[permo-w]

poor implementation aside, the format has its advantages over numerical coordinates

besides the greater public awareness of w3w amongst certain demographics compared to coordinates, they may be harder to hear, but it's much easier to read out three words correctly than it is 16-18 numbers

the thing with words is that they're easy to hear in context, but take them out of context and they're often indecipherable

perhaps a system that gives each square a coherent-sounding sentence could be tried, although I'm sure that would have its difficulties too

[CapitalistCartr]

Yeah, to avoid that confusion, it won't be three words when spoken.

"arrows.midst.senses"

Will become "Alpha, romeo, romeo, oscar, whiskey, sierra. Mike, india, delta, sierra, tango. Sierra, echo, november, sierra, echo, sierra".

[inopinatus]

Coherence is unfortunately a subjective matter, as in the phrase “too.much.butter” which is syntactically valid but has no comprehensible meaning.

[permo-w]

I enjoyed this

[thakoppno]

The fifth decimal of a GPS coordinate resolves down to 1.1 meter.

Ten numbers doesn’t sound much more difficult than three words to me.

[mlyle]

12.34567N 89.01234W is 14 digits, 2 points, and 2 signs or letters.

Earth is about 2^49 square meters. If you want precision of ~8 square meters, you're going to need to convey 46 bits of information (or use an optimization that gives less resolution over oceans, etc, but that's only going to be a small win-- a bit or two).

46/3.3 = 14 digits, but the latitude/longitude coding is a little less efficient because it's not uniform. A plus code does it in 11 characters (not including the plus) worth each 4.32 bits =~ 47.5 bits.

[permo-w]

if Earth sqm = 2^49: to address a single metre, we'd need 49 bits. log_10(2^49) = 14.75 so we'd need 15 spoken decimal digits for 1 sqm. for 8m do log_10(2^47)

[mlyle]

> if Earth sqm = 2^49: to address a single metre, we'd need 49 bits.

Yes-- that's why I said it was 46 bits for an 8 square meter area (because this is about the size of area you care about for this problem-- W3W is 9 square meters).

> for 8m do log_10(2^47)

No, because 2^3 = 8, so one does log_10(2^(49-3)) and gets 13.8. 46 / 3.3 =~ 13.9 works because 1/log_10(2) =~ 3.3.

[blacksmith_tb]

I'd say that's not so different from using IP addresses instead of DNS - generally not too popular (and that's for IPv4...)