[kmschaal]

I think What3Words is in principle a nice idea, but it could have been implemented much better. I am thinking of the following:

- have a fixed pattern, e.g. adjective.adjective.noun.

- create groups of words and put them in hierarchies. E.g. noun->animal->predator

- cover the world with a one-dimensional Hilbert curve

- Increment the noun along the curve. When all nouns are exhausted, start with the first noun again and increment the adjective in the middle, a.s.o. (analog to how incrementing a number with several digits works).

With this approach, the location purple.flying.tiger would be next to purple.flying.lion.

[lhl]

I spent a few minutes exploring a similar. Using the EFF wordlist (7776 words designed to be unambiguous)[1] you should be able to get down to about 100m^2 blocks (good enough for SAR), the BIP39 word list (2048) is a bit too resolution, but is a lot easier to pronounce, maybe worth some encoding shenanigans to get it to work).

For my POC, I also used a simple 1D hilbert curve. Running a simulation and plotting the words, you actually get pretty decent resolution, and it's even alphabetical by distance. Output from simple demo w/ BIP39 (math might not be correct): https://ibb.co/MnmcRFk but you can see that the word order actually make sense (although "winner" and "winter" are too phonetically similar, but still, gets the point across).

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-p...

[hgomersall]

That's specifically problematic: what was their location again? Uhm, it was purple flying something.. some kind of big cat.. lion or tiger..

Large conceptual distance between close physical locations is a feature not a bug.

[Gys]

It is not like that by design. Remember, this is backed by VCs that already put in a lot of money and in some future will want to make a lot of money.

The 3 words idea is patented and the basic idea is to have a drm protected database that is needed to find the actual location. The play the long game. Ultimately selling access to the database will make them money.

[thelittlenag]

You should check out https://www.qalocate.com/solutions/geohashphrase/