A precise, three-word address for every place on earth | Chris Sheldrick
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- Опубліковано 8 лис 2017
- With what3words, Chris Sheldrick and his team have divided the entire planet into three-meter squares and assigned each a unique, three-word identifier, like famous.splice.writers or blocks.evenly.breed, giving a precise address to the billions of people worldwide who don't have one. In this quick talk about a big idea, Sheldrick explains the economic and political implications of giving every location on earth an accurate address -- from building infrastructure to sending aid to disaster zones to delivering hot pizza.
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A: So what's your address?
B: Disappointment, frustration, sadness.
A: Oh, ok.
Can I ask Google Maps how far it is from disappointment.frustration.sadness to smelly.animal.farts and what roads to take to get there?
This is a genius system but was it a deliberate decision to have adjacent squares not have a related name or any level of accuracy? The google pluscodes do allow for less accurate and shorter addresses but it’s harder to remember
That's address is invalid but their is disappointment.frustration.soda . Yes that a real location it's in Tete
What if I someone gets into trouble in a very new place. How can they know their current address to call SOS
@@Bodabodabroadcast nope. There is legit thing. Korhogo, savanes
I work as a London bus driver, one day I walked in to one of our roadside canteens to find a college suffering from a stroke although I knew exactly where I was I had no idea what the address was but I was able to get the ambulance services to me using this app… what 3 words you played a big part in saving his life that day. Thank you
So, if you make a mistake and have written 'red-apple-tree' instead 'red-apple-three' the distance between these two places can be about 1000 miles
the point is that they have an algorithm that purposefully places similar adresses so far away that it should be obvious which one is correct based on context. pretty weird approach if you ask me. if theyd use opposite algorithm thatd place similar addresses close to each other, for instance, by sorting them in alphabetic order, itd be much easier to navigate
There is no usage for this "3word navigation". Maybe it can be used like easier way to remember coordinates. I can write program that can translate this "n1,n2,n2" into this "word1,word2,word3" in 15 minutes. Fortunately i have a list of 100k the most frequently used English words in my archive. And i can do it sorted or randomly placed and it still be useless.
Actually, we already have 5 word navigation: country - region - city - street - house. And it works well. And if i do not want to go through the border of one of the area i do not need to name it. I can say "street A - house B", or " town A street B house C" if i mean the other town. Why they do not like it? Because they want to invent something scientific :)
Сергей Дикобразов You would obviously know the name of the town.
This 'mistake' could easily send you to the other side of the planet.
I downloaded the app and adjacent squares on there grid (which equal 0.1sec resolution in Lat/Long) are completely different, not sharing a singe word. This means that you wouldn't be able to find someone standing 10 feet away from you based on this system without the what3words app, Google maps, GPS and a solid data connection.
Seems like a lot of work to avoid a pair of 8 digit numbers that get you to exactly the same location, can be plotted by hand on a paper map and has been used for centuries.
This sounds a lot like the pitch from the late night infomercials trying to sell us on a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
Yeah, because (35.6811716,139.7648576) just rolls right off the tongue.
Millions of unlettered children get lost in crowded India and never find home again since they don't have a home address. Being taught 3 simple words would solve so much. Even a 4 year old can be taught those 3 words instead of a complicated address, which sometimes doesn't exist.
huh. that might be the only use for this actually. thats pretty good
Hmm, well that is one use case
Brilliant
I am pretty sure that isn’t a real problem in India, and this wouldn’t be the way you could solve that hypothetical problem.
@@Winters11 No, it's an actual problem in India.
Great idea, but does anybody know how the system is dealing with skyscrapers where people not only life on different X-Y-axis but also on y-axis?
Name1.name2.name3 room 37 etc
Witch Hunter cool thanks!
Witch Hunter my street address would still be the same length: street name, number , postcode and the apartment, it's not really practical in a lot of city's
Ellie G This is Golden
It's just an 3x3m approximation and not a very precise address, that could replace your current one. It's made for secluded locations where no address system exists. With just 3 words you can easily locate anyone on earth, even if it's in the middle of nowhere and 3x3m is pretty accurate in that case.
While fascinating, this type of system is ONLY useful in a digital database. If you don't have access to your GPS of choice, you're completely screwed. Nothing about this system lets you know that you can just follow Main street to the 100 block to get to 123 Main Street. He may have "simplified" lat/long, but he hasn't made it any easier to use in actual practice.
The great thing about addresses is that they convey some kind of hierarchy. Country, state, city, zipcode, street, number are hierarchical indicators. You know that all addresses with the same zipcode are in the same area. Can you say the same for all 3 word addresses that contain lion? Or lion as the first word?
Chris Hitchcock It could be a lingering option if there is an incentive to develop smart infrastructure in the future. Nevertheless I don't see this system being feasible in the near future.
That's cause it's not for you. It's for the government.
Street names are not hierarchical though... Honestly, what's wrong with learning the basic concept of GPS?
Jarful of Love street names alone not. But they at least cluster homes together along the same road. In Japan houses have block numbers, not street numbers, that makes a bit more sense hierarchically. However those numbers are distributed by age of the house. Not perfect but at least you know in which street or block you gotta look
This is such a brilliant idea! It doesn’t seem like it makes too much sense because it’s not something we are used to, but I really hope one day everyone has an address.
A lot of people here are poo-pooing this technology, but as a GIS student, I can say that this is definitely a revolutionary attempt to define addresses. As Mr. Sheldrick mentions, many developing countries are skipping the entire infrastructure development process of adding traditional phone lines, etc. and going directly to mobile and web infrastructures, which, regardless of whether or not you believe it, is the way of the future. As such, while it is true that many people in poverty will not have access to mobile phones *yet*, many companies are trying to bring internet and web infrastructure to the poorest areas (see Elon Musk's interest in supplying the entire world with cheap internet). Rather than go through the laborious process of manually adding addresses and street names to areas that don't even have electricity yet, this is one way that these countries can skip that process and apply an address system that is universally recognized by the government and local businesses. I will be fascinated to see how this technology continues to be applied to mobile services as well as to traditional mapping softwares like ArcGIS.
Lat,long and altitude are too difficult so lets create a system with 40,000 characters that it only works if you have a GPS and a solid data connection.
dodekeract,
Because you need access to the database of the 60 billion word combinations and their associated lat and long for the GPS to find the location
my sarcastic thoughts exactly
chrisose There is no database of pre-generated word-combinations. They are determined by a PRNG. Download the app, turn on flight mode and see, you still find every address in the world (I just tried it).
Nimantu,
Which relies entirely on the long/lat data from Google maps which in turn requires a data connection to load each plat of maps and to give any form of navigational assistance. The 'addresses' are completely useless without technology since they are effectively random, with adjacent blocks having no logical reference to each other. The result of this is that someone could give you an address 10ft away from you and you would have no idea how to find it without your phone and a data connection.
This isn't about lat, long, it's about providing an easy address system with something that will be easy. So countries that don't have an address system or a messy one can just provide a three word "address" to the property. That also makes it something that people can easily remember.
Also, Cube Earth has been confirmed.
this is actually not as dumb as it sounds, i laughed at the beginning, but then it got me thinking. i guess the main idea here is to overlay the current coordinate system, with a human friendly and intuitive three words system, not bad.
the dumb thing is that require a gps to work, and if you have a gps is far easier to use lat/long
@@SergioLongoni In the case of an emergency, you are less likely to give them GPS coordinates than you are 3 words. And yes, the UK emergency services are using this.
someone says to you quickly I'm on address "night knight knife" wyd?
They actually dealt with that problem of similar sounding words. He didn't say it in this talk, but they sorted the words so that none that sound the same are together, or even in the same area. That makes this situation not quite impossible, but very very unlikely.
@@awesomelyshorticles Probably the left over billions of combinations can be used for this.
His addressing scheme is not really an addressing scheme, just a random naming convention for random blocks. The name gives no hint about location, which is what an address is all about. Two places right next to each other, or one just stacked on top of another (such as any multi-story place), have unrelated addresses.
Heck, I just looked at my home, and it appears that I have some 25 addresses for my home, no two of which are remotely related.
This is the obvious issue i see. It seems like this has to be used with other navigating technology to make wayfinding practical.
So are street names, unless you count places with numbers as road names, you just won't know where a road is unless you know the neighborhood. This guy's system uses a nomenclature that it's easy to remember and to search on a phone. Which is already infinitely better than having to say "take a right after the rock and drive for 10 minutes.".
If you 25 addresses, just pick the address at your preferred doorstep. “Problem” solved.
@Chris Well a post code is, which is part of an address. For instance in London SW1 you may know as being central London, or BS1 being central bristol or B1 being central Birmingham. B15 is likely to be further out, so your point falls flat.
This is perfect for meeting friends at crowded places like in front of a sports arena or in the city. I think I'll going to use it for that from now on. Three words and all your friends know exactly where to meet.
If you can run the app required for this system to work, you can run a much easier "find my friends" app
Yeah! This is great because it doesn't have to be a house or anything!
Also because sometimes the entrance to 72 Some House St. is on the other side of the block, and because (35.6811716,139.7648576) just rolls right off the tongue.
Since all of you would need a smartphone or computer for it to work, why not just share the GPS location over sms/mail ? It's already pretty easy with any map application. No need to type, say or memorise anything!
@@zakinster1 But if you had to say it over the phone quickly, how would you memorize 16 didigts GPS coordinates?
This is very useful when used in conjunction with the addressing system that is currently used in developed countries, as sometimes one struggles to find a certain house number or a certain building. For third world countries and certain areas that have none, this 3 word system is better than nothing, addressed to people moaning about that gps is needed and bla bla, even if they are random words.
The entire ivory coast is adopting it, so it must be better than what they have now.
Absolutely incredible talk thankyou! Our council in Queensland Australia has started using “what 3 words” and I came straight to UA-cam to find out what it was all about.
I don't know about this. It has two advantages:
readability & memorability
somewhat error correcting
precision/high quantity
but it has the disadvantage that there is no hierarchy or structure to it.
As a result the adress doesn't carry any information of you don't have the database that maps every coordinate to every adress. If your adress is missing one word you don't have an estimate of the position. If you have two adresses you cant estimate the distance.
I don't know in detail how their system works but I think it would have been better if they had created an easy method to parse coordinates to words.
for example by creating a set of words that represent a high basis (~60?) to represent the coordinates intuitively and with the advantages of this system.
if the database is in public domain this idea have some value: let's say it is a DNS system. Of curse you have to convert the name into coordinates and then you can navigate.
If the database is private and you have to be online to lookup an address this is useless
I live in the french countryside, and delivery guys always struggle to find my home ! With that system, it would be soooo simple to tell them where to go !
this is just stupidly brilliant...wow...most people will say it wont work, blah blah blah...but it already works
A great out of the box idea! There is so much additional information in traditional addresses. If someone says to you, he lives in garden.mustache.ridiculous, he might live in the Carribean, but also in Australia or Sweden. If he says he lives in Dheli, you can already link all your knowledge about Dheli to that fact. So great addressing System for Computers, very bad one for human minds. But stripping the system from what the human mind needs seems to be exactly what makes it perfect for apps, which makes this a great out of the box idea.
I once was in a situation, where I needed to call an ambulance. As current technology still lacks submitting GPS coordinates, I had to vaguely describe my position. They arrived at the exact opposite side of the area. Such a three-word-combination would have helped a lot.
How do you describe quality.quiet.pine? I have not been at that train station before that ambulance call, neither did I know the surrounding area. I told them the train station, but I did not know any more detailed description, or from which side they would arrive, in order to guide them by walking and waving.
My three words for this video: That Is Awesome
Wouldn't it be better to make it easily decodable to latitude and longitude?
For example this would be possible:
- Dedicate first word for latitude.
- Dedicate second word for longitude.
- Earth Circumference is 40000km that lets us divide latitude to the accuracy of 500m and longitude to the accuracy of 1km by the 40000 words they mentioned.
- This gives us a block of 1000x500 meters.
- We assign the third word in grid pattern on the block to identify exactly which 3x3 area on that block.
Same level of accuracy but easier to deal with GPS unavailability.
This is a much better system. If this was generated and the whole database put into public domain, I'd use it.
Mohaimenul Haque Adnan why would gps become unavailable?
If our satellites go down we have bigger problems
Those words are completely useless to people. You NEED supporting technology to make sense of them and so they are not much different than IP addresses. If each adjacent box was named relative to the surrounding ones it would make it much easier to reason about space without having to use their website or whatever. But, I guess the point is to sell a product, not to actually make lives easier.
yeah... if you need a gps to figure out your 3 word address, you might as well use your coordinates.
If you designed a grouping scheme so that one could be able to tell in which direction an address is based on where they are... oh wait, that's still coordinates.
I'm keeping my telephone book.
FabledDan There are countless issues with grouping ANY names, the only way you could possibly implement a grouping system that's actually easier in any way than what we have today is with a pre-existing system... But there isn't one. This could be the first database and could seriously change the world. Think about logistical elements of that which you talk about my man.
> If each adjacent box was named relative to the surrounding ones it would make it much easier to reason about space
You are talking about using hierarchical solutions which work in locations that are designed with hierarchy. The mass sprawl this video refers to is not, and does not, grow hierarchically.
They just simplified the coordinate system so we can use it casually. No one says their coordinate location to their friends, but their 3 words is easy to say. It could be taught to kids when they get lost for example.
In a Developed country it is not that good as a standalone, but to add those three words to your adress is not that hard and even in Germany with a decent postal system you are sometimes still struggeling to find backhouses etc.
So to me its a nice addition and easier to remember than coordinates.
Although it would be nice if you only had very distingishing words.
but having a city Name and the words you should find the place :)
So there is no naming system. It's random. So it relies on a database. So I can't pull out a map and figure it out. So I MUST own a GPS??? Seriously???
Who carries a paper map with then nowadays? If you have a map, you have a phone, you can find it.
You can purchase a map of your city with the squares on it.
Problem solved in case you couldn’t access the internet or when electricity is gone
@JACL A map with a grid showing and naming 3x3m squares. That does not work.
Dopamine Media this system is designed for places where classic systems have failed. It's fundamentally different , precisely to be able to solve issues of other systems. If you are living in New York where every street has a name, and every building has a number, then, you don't need it. You need w3w when the official institutions did not care drawing roads and assigning names to streets. Randomness is required for several reliability reasons.
I have installed the app. It's 23MB, and never will need to grow in size, or never need update ever. You only need to catch geo positional satellites to drive (not specifically GPS. which is American system )
It only relies on a database of words (dictionary), but not for every 3-word-combination. They are pseudo-random.
For the people under here who didnt understand the point of the video:
1 lat long altitude: you still cant know it if you dont have a gps so whats the point.
2 this is not to traverse terrain, use a map for that. This is to give an address to people.
3 How is easy to mispell a word so it is to miss a digit in the gps number. (and usually a mispelled word is still recognisable)
4 This thing works offline too and you dont need it online to compute the three words because it calculates it offline based on a dictionary.
5 you want to tell me you go into a cab and tell the driver longitude and latitude of your airbnb? Try that one time and look the poor man's face.
What's wrong with Lat/Long?
Kahale Ishikawa Zooko's Triangle. It's not human-meaningful/memorable. It's much easier to remember the three-word address than it is an arbitrary, high-precision lat/long.
Yet, how easy are the words to remember when you don't speak English?
Watch the video sir, and observe the 'translating to 14 languages' part.
Mike Trieu good point, but they don't seem to come in any logical sequence.
Jek Porkins There is method to the madness. Shorter, simpler words for metro areas. No homophones for adjacent areas. Singular namespace with the smallest dictionary size possible. If you go hierarchical, you have to make a considerable trade-off in one of these areas.
Sounds like a terrible idea. Addresses have to be hierarchical if they are to be any good at all. This is why we use: country, region, (sub-region), town/village, road/track, dwelling name/number, person's name, bank account number, amount, for example.
GPS coordinates aren't hierarchical, because they do not rely on human constructs of the world like countries and states. Any point in the world is methodologically identically, yet uniquely represented in the system. The only hierarchy is defining the zero point for latitude and longitude (which is a point on the equator, in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, off the southern coast of western Africa), and defining which way is negative and which way is positive in latitude and longitude.
The problem with a hierarchical system is that an error can be introduced at any level of the hierarchy. For example, the address "37, High Street, Villageville" is fine as long as you are in Villageville. If you mistakenly end up in Townsville, you can still find High Street, and then find 37 High Street, but it will be the wrong address because the error has been made at a single level of the hierarchy. And if you watch the video, much of the point of this is to give an easily used addressing system where they have none, eg remote and undeveloped areas
George Gach I agree, the three words system is a joke.
Consider the three word system a DNS for lat/long. Though yeah it would have made more sense to "cluster" the three word system instead of making it random.
Yes, but because I know my city is more or less at 77 west and 12 south (Lima, Perú... we study this in school) I'll know my location in the world in relation to, lets say, 74 west, 40 north (NY). It's not that difficult... if you are not a dumbed down liberal, of course.
Mindfuck: It turns out your MyThreeWords address is the same as your normal address.
So I contacted my friend (who's a mathematician) and asked him if he could help me draw squares over a map. Because, you know, math.
i am glade you finally get the words out on TED n___n
this is so awesome, I'll use it from now on!!
Genius. Excellent Work
I'd like to see the mathematician who managed to divide a sphere into squares :D
Finally a valid criticism.
Cube Earth Confirmed
Ever heard of surface area?
What's your point, jacl?
Distorted at poles, maybe up to 7.5m for one of the sides maximum I think I heard from somewhere?
if you have now 2 three-word addresses, you have no idea how far apart they are without learning 74 trillion combinations by heart.
well done. this is not a logical setup in any way.
i would've guessed every logitutal line had the same first word. same with lattitutal and second word... and sort alphabetically, so that way you know if 2 different ones for example Brick.x.y and Brag.x.y are pretty closeby
How far away are 17405 Main Street and 203 Abbey Road ?
Nyt Mare how far away are 17405 Main St and 17407 Main St? Which direction do you head to get to deep.wheel.tart if you’re standing at the corner of beef.fart.nickel and itch.run.wobble? Wait, the whole corner is beef.fart.nickel... and if you need a GPS phone to get you there, you already have a pretty damn good maps app, which knows lat/lon, and doesn’t require a lookup table with trillions of randomly assigned records that requires constant updates for new addresses.
This is a good system, heres why:
Regular adresses will still be there.This makes lat/long a much simpler to use. Nobody said this will replace regular adressing, but enhance it. Notice how he only mentions far out places as examples and not NYC or other major town?Thats because they have system that works. This is a system for places unmapped by regular adressing.
This is like manmade fins. Its hindering on land, but in water its much helpful. And they both coexist (fin and no fin)
The thing is that the old system provides a solution to this problem only in cases, where it isn't a problem
Ian White Why would the w3w database ever need to be updated? All the addresses that will ever be are already assigned. Also, which one is easier to remember and duplicate without error: words or high-precision numbers?
Is no one else concerned with the fact that there is probably a 3meter square that you reside in with some terrible words in the name? What if my favorite eating location is now labeled “Bloody.gonorrhea.toothpaste” ?
Your favorite eating location would still have a name, only it's address would be bloody.gonorrhea.toothpaste.
Here's a more realistic example ... You wouldn't say to your friends "Hey why don't we go to 459 Henderson Avenue?" - instead you would say something like "Hey why don't we go to the Cheesecake Cafe?". If they ask you which one, that's when you would use the address and reply with something like "You know, the one we always go to - the one across the street from smelly.animal.farts."
This is fairly inspired work. Especially because it doesn't focus on prpert lines, but on geograpic locations. You can literally differentiate between your front door and your back door....
Much needed solution in a world full of incompetent governments.
The 3 words implementation might succeed because of its quirkyness but it would be great if one of those words had a connection with a nearby street or location.
Shouldn't it be Which3words?
This should be accepted everywhere! Google should implement this
Excellent!!
I can see this working out for drone deliveries worldwide. If you want it more accurate, like, in a 1 by 1 meter rather than 3 by 3, just use a simple 3 by 3 matrix.
e.g Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. 2-1. This would mean 2nd row and 1st column of the 3 by 3 m. You can now break it up into 1 by 1.
One possible issue is height. If you live in an apartment, many people share your address. Then it's level 7 unit 3 room 4 Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. Simple enough.
I'm seeing far too many commenters that are entirely missing the point. If the guy had directly said that it was meant for places that were not adressed well, and if you have an adress you probably don't need it, then a lot of these comments would probably go away. He also couldve told the advantage of being able to tell someone where to deliver goods, someone with a database to know where it is, versus trying to communicate GPS Coordinates. Perhaps he should've done a comparison to show how it works better for certain situations.
AWESOME!!!
thats all great except if you live at "Moist, Hemorrhoid, Tunnel"
Sigh Phi Guy Sorry for destroying your joke, but that address does not exist.
Sigh Phi Guy I guess you wanted to say, there might be very funny combinations, right? Let's search them 😎
OF COURSE it doesnt exist!
youre the guy that has to explain every joke.
you must be very fun to be around.
Amazing!!!
Kind of a good idea, but what about skyscrapers or any two-story building, also they don't really give you a judgement of distance for example if something is at, 345 Main Street New York, versus, pop cat down, which one would you think is closer
0:33 a sun wheel, quite a controversial symbol.
'where the streets have no name'
Paradigm shift...I like it
there are trillions of unused 3-word combinations that might be useful to divide the Martian surface into 3mx3m squares.
I think a global gps based upon numbers is actually easier. Just simplify the model to make it number based upon some hierarchy (not just lat-long). Three random words is unlikely to be very helpful.
I mean, it's an interesting idea, but it's only potentially useful for those who have GPS. Those who don't, we will still need some kind of street addressing. I don't see how you can get around that unless you somehow assume everything will have GPS at all time?
Everyone's just saying that this system doesn't work. While I'm over here like "Wait, did you just say 'shedgule'?"
This is a fantastic idea. We lose so many people on our coastline due to either a lack of respect for the sea or the conditions .... if this saves one life it's worth it !!!
This system might tell you _where_ something is, but not _how_ to get there. If I tell you 221B Baker Street, London, then you know to take a street map of London, look up the street in the index, then, when you arrive, follow the street in whichever direction lets the house numbers get closer to 221. 221B will be close to 221, and you can be pretty sure that the main entrance will be accessible from Baker Street.
So Sheldrick's system may be a good start, but what is really needed is an AI that creates maps of streets / paths / tracks from satellite images and perhaps the tracking of people's movements --- oh, wait, but isn't this what Google and Open Street Map are doing already? Give them a few more years, and slums / favelas will be mapped like everywhere else, too.
Except '221 Baker street' doesn't exist, that is unless you count the Sherlock Holmes themed shop which confusingly purports to be at that address which is actually some way up the road and doesn't follow the sequential numbering system that you describe. The location that should logically be 221 Baker street is occupied by a posh new apartment building that refers to itself as 219 Baker Street.
By failing 'gracefully', and giving an approximate, but often wrong location, which may never be resolved correctly in third world locations where addressing systems are even more chaotic or simply non existent, confidence in any address given in this manner is limited. In contrast addresses given using this three word system will, when tested out prior to your departure, fail catastrophically when given in error, giving either no address at all or some address on the other side of the world which is obviously wrong. Presented with such a catastrophic failure, you can contact the person giving you an address, get them to correctly restate it, and simply use a smartphone app to direct you to a precise and correct 3m by 3m square.
I was just considering removing my mailbox to not have an address.
Why not use an alpha numeric code based on some kind of logical order for your grid? Then wherever you were you could logically figure out how close you are to your destination, and what direction to go to get there.
brilliant!
How will it deal with continental drift?
the square will just go over different geography
Very interesting concept, but from what i understand, adjacent squares don't have similar names, which i think is a problem. I see a lot of criticism in the comments, but i think that this idea is very good on principle. I'm sure it can be improved a lot, but the concept itself is a good start. It feels like DNS but for GPS addresses. I would just want adjacent places to have similar names. And addresses that bear the name of the country/city/region in them wouldn't hurt. What about a ... approach? If you are in Nevada (US), it could be US.Nevada.cat.truck or something. At least you would have a basic idea of where the address is actually pointing to.
Great idea
coherent.ages.piano :)
Very interesting
Got a W3W advert before this lol
would have made way more sense to not distribute the addresses randomly. like use the same first word for country ect, same second for city/area and then have the last word alphabetically related to its neighbors
The downside to that is that it would be much easier to confuse addresses, as every address in an area would have an almost identical sounding name. Also it would be a much more complicated system to implement.
No it wouldn't. So there.
Top Lobster When the place you're at has no official addressing infrastructure at all (much of the world), this is much more preferred than nothing. And the battery dying scenario would equally affect any GNSS solution, so you're no better there. At least a local subset of these can be printed in a physical index for offline use.
In poor countries, often it is easier to have an internet connection than implement a huge and complex addressing system.
If you take a step back from your comment and use some logic after watching the video, you would understand why your wrong.
Brilliant
Can't wait to go to a funeral at
"Suck" "it" "up"
So how do you handle being on the 42nd floor? 3 words + a height?
three words+ 42nd floor? maybe
I think they covered that question on another video :) I just don't quite remember
Solution to a problem that never existed. Longitude-latitude system is sufficient.
Exactly
Yeah but this is easier to remember, imagine calling the emergency services and saying -30.814516, 147.641181
But yes the longitude and latitude is good
Oooooor (and not to sound salty), you can just use Lat/Long. Only 2 numbers, and you have pen point accuracy.
yeah but bunch of numbers is harder to remember than 3 words.
jerrylittlemars long lat are not reliable for two reasons. 1 there are several writing schemes (floats vs minutes , and even minutes system has two sub systems : decimal minutes, and minutes + second ) . 2 it does not include a crc to secure against spelling or typos. (for example the social security number in France does include a crc. The world wide system for bank numbering BIC+IBAN also include crc ). So for a pizza dilevry, three words spelled in the local language is much more accurate and safe than a stupidly long stream of numbers.
jerrylittlemars Pinpoint accuracy.
I live in Jordan, it doesn't have exact addresses. Everyone, even really poor people, can get a smartphone. They just share their GPS location. I'm interested in this a bit because I'm thinking of starting a website to sell homes - I'm trying to think how good 3 word addresses really are. Most people would like the address to tell you the area you live in as well.
I wonder if the grid would work on the oceans, if somebody was lost at sea, or shipwrecked.
Brilliant Idea. I may go for a pint this afternoon at spine.softly.adjust.
Wow just wow
great!
excellent project
I'm bad at spelling so this would make it difficult. Not to mention there are multiple ways to spell certain words so people with some addresses like "weather.there.colour" would have to constantly explain the spelling.
His eyes are so beautiful
...and New York America ends up a three word address to a guy in Russia...
After reading the comments i thought the idea was bad, but after checking out the homepage... it's still a bad idea, but it's freaking hilarious. ROFL
How am I finding out about this just now?
Very important topic that he...addresses here 😎
Could be a critical advantage to anyone needing aid and stranded in an unfamiliar location...
You are my hero!! I've devised a system which for some reason uses a 3:1:1 ratio on everything as well as #3SimpleThings - Respect, Gratitude and Kindness as the moral code to kickstart the change we all want. Amazing... well done. So thrilled it's working out so well for so many already.
A purely numeric system would not require translation into many different languages and could also be useful in that increasing numbers could indicate directionality. Adding digits could add precision, if necessary. Why not latitude, longitude, height? This 3 word system seems very cumbersome and unintuitive.
Excellent concept, countless applications, blockchain-enabled
That makes no sense
Bro i wonder where the three words (what.three.words) will lead you in the app
Kinda gross that 2 spots so close together dont even share a word. I wonder if a... 22nd order Hillbert Curve for the gride projection would make it more or less complicated.
I work at depict.limp.functions.
How do you account for vertical addresses in skyscrapers though?
3 words I love it
Or a postcode.
Patrick Carroll Many places in the world just don't have the infrastructure in place for stable postal codes. That's the entire point of this technology.
watch the video before you comment
How do you use the three words on Google Maps?
Why would you create such an amazing thing and decide to use word combinations!?
Words have to be translated but pretty much everyone can understand numbers even if they have different numbering systems.
And yes there would be enough possible combinations if characters such as ( #/ -) and I don't believe it would end up being an insanely long number. Especially if an "area code" would be used.
But I guess if all these are "translated" into bar codes that woold feel more viable.
@Ellie G Totally agree X,Y,Z axes would be a good addition.
It would still need to be translated back into GPS co-ordinates for whoever is navigating, so it's basically a way for the uneducated to stay uneducated by memorizing meaningless word combinations, rather than learning the fairly basic GPS system and actually understanding what they're asking for when they request a destination.
Its a way of expressing GPS coordinates in an error-resistant way applying the strengths of human memory and avoiding weaknesses of human memory.
BarnacleBread, thanks for having some common sense
On the contrary, because it relies on an arbitrary and meaningless word combination, rather than a sequential numerical system (much like money), it becomes much more error prone and less intuitive.
For example, when children learn how money works, they understand that higher numbers mean more expensive, and lower numbers mean cheaper, and can intuitively tell if there is an error when, for example, buying less lollies costs more money.
Once you learn that further east means a higher longitude number, and further north means a higher latitude number, you can roughly tell if the coordinates you receive are more or less in the right direction. This requires literally no memory at all. Meanwhile, being given a string of meaningless words provides no intuitive ability to roughly verify logically.
this
So you suppose every person learn their latitude and longitude number, when talking to a government official who can locate you. And these numbers, are they easy to memorise? Are they easier than three distinct words? remember Soup Ratting Bowling.
Now remember the lat/lon of Nelson's Column. by the way, that is 51.507759, -0.127939. or is that just one corner of the column? So maybe its 51.507758, -0.127939? Hmmm.
Your lollies example considers variables that are all known 100% - amount of lollies. You can start from 0 lollies. You can then add one. then two. then three. Because you know... sorry no, this lolly thing is irrelevant. The three name system is ONE system of many. its function works primarily with a computer involved. When you have no tools at your disposal, except your memory, you need a quick, easy to remember code that a database can input, and help you out with in seconds.
It performs its function better than 51.507759, -0.127939, try to deny that.
Word Disassociation?
Aqua.Monorail.Plane
Type on comp. what three words go to map look at you place