NavList:

Tony, you wrote:
"I want to stress that in theory I could create a transcode table for the letter-grid system (used, for example, by SW radio amateurs) in my head, at least - I can reasonable guess where a ZEBBYHCC spot is. Because it is systematic. There is absolutely no way to do it for the 3-words system."

I agree. As I see it, the 3-words system has two major design flaws: 1) it can't be decoded without access to their database, and 2) neighboring locations do not have neighboring encodings. Its major advantage is easy "reading" and, to a lesser extent, easy memorization. Both the advantages and the flaws of what3words are conditioned by the bizarre rules of tech investment and tech venture capital. There is someone out there with deep pockets who became convinced a few years ago that what3words could make a fortune by licensing its system. And that is why this peculiar "article" (without doubt drawn from a company press release) exists and tells such fanciful tales.

At one point, mostly for my own amusement, I toyed around with creating a system that would have some of the advantage of the 3-word encoding while being closer to the lat/lon data. One option I considered, which I thought worked well, would use the names of sixty common mammals (first 20), birds (next 20), and fish (last 20) in alphabetical order to code minutes and seconds and 90 (or as many as 360) "somethings" (names of plants??)  to code degrees. And tenths of seconds of arc (or finer values) would be coded simply as digits. So an end-user might say something like, "we started our search at barley.dog.rabbit.1,tuna.dog.falcon.6 and ended at barley.dog.tiger.6, (same longitude)". So how far did they travel? Along a line of longitude they went from a latitude ending in rabbit.1 to one ending in tiger.6. That's a step of two alphabetically so 2.5 seconds of arc or about 250 feet.

Would a system like I imagined work? Twenty years ago it might have, but today, it's insufficiently international (too English). So we're back to numbers, and that's just plain latitude and longitude. Maybe I can get some venture capital behind this model!

One claim from the money behind what3words is that their system has been adopted "by Mongolia". Mongolia has a great mess of names for things, rendered in multiple alphabets. If you Google "Ulan Bator", you'll be taken to a Google Maps view of "Ulaanbaatar" and if you zoom in a bit, you'll see something labeled "Sukhbaatar Square Чингис Хаан талбай". The Cyrillic characters here are easy to read (for anyone who doesn't know the Cyrillic alphabet, the first two words spell Chingis Khan, also known as "Genghis Khan", a relatively famous figure in Mongolian history even today). I poked around, and I was able to find one example of an address given normally and also using what3words: Hotel Khan Palace. Given that this address can't be decoded without an app, and given that any app user already has Google Maps and other equivalent resources, where's the benefit??

Frank Reed