Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies

Google &quot;Plus Codes&quot; are being used in India - especially in underserved communities like slums.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.addressingtheunaddressed.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.addressingtheunaddressed.org&#x2F;</a> . If you want to use this tech + operations expertise in other geographies...just reach out to them. They intend to share their knowhow and expertise.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Hd3gGspgVGs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Hd3gGspgVGs</a><p>Also from what i understand, after the success in Kolkata, this was then used in Native American communities.<p>P.S. Plus Codes are open source - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;open-location-code" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;open-location-code</a> And they are well researched.<p>&gt;<i>The character set for Open Location Code was selected out of over eight billion possibilities, using a word list of 10,000 words from 30 languages. All possible sets were scored on whether they could spell the test words, and the most promising sets evaluated by hand.</i><p>&gt;<i>Plus codes can be encoded and decoded offline.<p>&gt;Plus codes do not depend on any infrastructure, and so are not dependent on any organisation or company for their continued existence or usage.</i>

This W3W system relies on the correct English spelling of 3 words, in the correct sequence to identify the location.<p>Can&#x27;t help but feel that this is a bad idea. From writing code, we know that the more code you use, the higher the chance of bug entering the code.<p>Also felt that the authorities are trying to extend the UK postcode system to the rest of the world.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Maidenhead_Locator_System" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Maidenhead_Locator_System</a><p>this is widely in use in the ham radio circle and it works great--if you know phonetic alphabets, it&#x27;s easily understood over the air, truncation is well-behaved, and so on and so forth.<p>edit: for SAR you probably need 8 characters not the customary 4&#x2F;6 character version

The article seems wrong about some of these locations:<p>&gt; duties.factory.person was located in China<p>I get Switzerland [1]<p>&gt; refuse.housework.housebound was in Australia<p>I get Belarus [2]<p>&gt; demand.heave.surprise was actually in Canada<p>I get China [3]<p>Now that&#x27;s really confusing. Is that a bug in the system that changes the locations of three-word-codes, or is that (very) poor reporting?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;what3words.com&#x2F;duties.factory.person" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;what3words.com&#x2F;duties.factory.person</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;what3words.com&#x2F;refuse.housework.housebound" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;what3words.com&#x2F;refuse.housework.housebound</a> [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;what3words.com&#x2F;demand.heave.surprise" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;what3words.com&#x2F;demand.heave.surprise</a>

It&#x27;s a little weird the algorithm doesn&#x27;t ensure minimum edit + soundex distance between all cell pairs.

W3W is a proprietary algorithm that has threatened people who published analyses of their algorithm. They got whatfreewords.org censored for publishing an independent open implementation.<p>It&#x27;s also not well designed, as plurals and homophones are not accounted for.<p>Avoid using or promoting this system.

Here’s the result of @cybergibbons’ reverse engineering into the distribution over w3w terms that only differ in singular vs. plural: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cybergibbons.com&#x2F;security-2&#x2F;why-what3words-is-not-suitable-for-safety-critical-applications&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cybergibbons.com&#x2F;security-2&#x2F;why-what3words-is-not-su...</a>

The examples given here seem like the best case of it going wrong, they’re in a different country and UK rescuers know within seconds that they’re wrong.<p>I think this case further down is much more concerning:<p>&gt; He found that the algorithm behind W3W often gave similar-sounding words and plural versions of words for locations in close proximity, which could cause confusion.<p>&gt; So, for example, circle.goal.leader and circle.goal.leaders are less than 1.2 miles (2km) apart along the River Thames.<p>I wonder if the algorithm could somehow make it so similar sounding words like this aren’t anywhere near each other physically. It’s not as big a problem that leader and leaders sound the same, if you guarantee that only one of them is in the UK or at least within the same city&#x2F;national park etc.

Recent and related:<p><i>Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27058271" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27058271</a> - May 2021 (35 comments)<p><i>Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27029706" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27029706</a> - May 2021 (3 comments)<p><i>What3Words: App used by emergency services under scrutiny</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26985759" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26985759</a> - April 2021 (14 comments)

I wonder if a more efficient system for this kind of use-case would be possible by giving up on &quot;global&quot; positioning.<p>by relying on context you can lower the area you need to have address combinations for. In practice you would simply repeat the addresses every couple of 1000km or so.<p>needing help and calling in rescue from the other side of the world while also being unable to say you are in such and such area is presumably not something that happens too often.

At a minimum the scheme should include a checksum.

Sounds like they need to prune the word list and&#x2F;or group together possible mispronunciations, misspellings and misreadings. If &quot;correct horse battery&quot; is a location, then &quot;correct hose battery&quot; and &quot;correct house battery&quot; need to be synonyms of the same location, not alternate locations. Either that or remove horse, hose and house from the word list entirely.

I have to mention Geohash because it&#x27;s easy to spell, licence free, variable precision, what else? Plug: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.mro.name&#x2F;geohash.cgi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.mro.name&#x2F;geohash.cgi</a><p>That said, having familiar words in your (local?) alphabet is charming. But for public good it HAS to be public domain (the alphabet + algo, not the service, however).

I always thought that a combination of a geohash-like z order curve over a 15km radius, with an offline gps coordinates list of the 5000 most populated cities on earth would be sufficient to cover 99% of people on earth.<p>Not sure what&#x27;s the average number of characters required for a 20m to 100m precision with such method.<p>It&#x27;s true that the idea of plus codes of using city names makes a lot of sense.

Terrible: based on a single language, proprietary, IP owners being assholes, creates problems to the user case it was supposedly designed for, doesn&#x27;t feature distance computing algorithms, takes even more space in a DB cell than latlong, I can go on for days.<p>Use numbers.

I don&#x27;t envy the team. It&#x27;s a great idea but falls short once it leaves the lab. Everything gets really dirty in the real world especially during high stress or emergencies.<p>Moving to four words could really help remove the need for plural and words that sound similar. Accents really do make things tough.

One of my favorite atomic tourism sites is near charm files rush (Red Gate Woods, outside Chicago, home to the remains of Chicago Piles 2 and 3), or is it charm file rush (Which is in Brazil), or is it charms file rush, on the border between New Hampshire and Maine?<p>Not a good system.

analogous to hash collision? what4words would reduce it. But you can&#x27;t stop english language pluralisms (for instance) and if you start to make all plurals synonymous, you reduce the wordcount massively.

What are the scenarios where you know the 3 words but not the lat-long?

What? Why not just give a fucking location? What the hell is this?

Morse code and other maybe newer concise encodings are inevitable.

once we escape our ubiquitious communication problem we will have no issues understanding one another

They forgot to mention how many times it helped to find people in need. its easy to say 45 times there was an error - imagine how many times emergency services around the world get sent to the wrong or unaccurate location...

&gt; jump.legend.warblers which was in Vietnam<p>So they knew exactly that it was wrong. So it worked perfectly.<p>If you want to be hip you could write a program to work out what was actually said given other information, ie what cell tower it came from.<p>I hate 3 words, I can&#x27;t remember why, maybe it was copyright or something, but this article isn&#x27;t selling why it&#x27;s a problem.<p>Rescuers will also get all the normal info like the parents who might know the track, and everything else said.<p>Saying just use latitude and longitude co-ordinates, is like saying &quot;MREW is keen to encourage anyone planning a day in the outdoors to carry a paper map and a compass&quot;<p>Latitude and longitude is scary and complex. Rescuers might think it&#x27;s easy but I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s plenty of things they find scary and hard other people find easy. Just the appearance of most of the latitude and longitude apps is technical. &#x27;What 3 Words&#x27; sounds like teddy bears.