What3Words – The Algorithm

Great summary, thanks

Spelling is very much an underappreciated problem. Written English is particularly bad, sometimes requiring memorization that's not much unlike Chinese characters, because of the written language not adapting to the vowel shifts and changes in pronunciation, as well as the mess of a history the language has gone through as it developed in the UK.

Children, dyslexics, non-native speakers, all will have a hard time writing down many words even if they're part of the top 1000 list.

With the right word set (avoiding homophones) and the presence of autocorrect (or an input only allowing the limited word list), you could probably create a pretty resilient system if you only take the most common words (top 1k would likely be sufficient). You'll need a longer address, but remembering six words is a lot easier than remembering six letters.

Sadly, the entire concept is flawed and doomed for as long as the goons of What Three Words operate their business like a failed media company, sending out threats, falsifying legal documents to enforce takedown requests, and lawyering up to anyone who even considers applying "their" algorithm on their own. "Their" idea may be patentable in the US, but in areas of the world where there is no such patent, these goons cannot take down the competition without lying and dishonesty and they've shown to do anything to prevent any competitor from entering the market.

> Spelling is the Achilles' heel of all word-based systems.

Stick with nouns? Then you can use icons as supplements. Ball, Pen, Light bulb, Burger, Guitar.

Possibly easier to translate between languages, too.

The issue of hierarchy is that it's orthogonal to having very different results for nearby areas.

With a hierarchy you immediately run into, "Am I in gibbons.apple.banana or was it gibbons.apple.bandana" which is just down the road.

Without hierarchy it jumps out that one of those results is improbable if tallied with any knowledge of roughly where the person is.

You also need to distinguish between the contexts where you need addresses versus coordinates.

Lat-longs, plus codes, and word-encoding schemes are all coordinates -- they identify a point or area on the globe.

Addresses are last-mile navigational instructions. "Apt D, 123 Main St" allows anyone with local knowledge to navigate efficiently to the location indicated: first they drive to Main Street, then they proceed along the ~monotonically numbered parcels to 123, then continue to the apartment labeled "D".

The advantage of coordinates is that they don't require local knowledge and can identify arbitrary points; the advantage of addresses is that they encode instructions for land navigation that takes into account which parts of the land are passable.