Oh geez I didn't know any of this. We have planned to explore using this tool for one of our products. This effectively kills it.
Kinda curious why you would be using something like this?
What's silly about W3W is that their entire "proprietary algorithm" is going to be the same as all of these, except with /usr/share/dict/words instead of A-Z0-9 as the alphabet.
The only reason they need Kubernetes clusters on AWS is to keep their word list secret, every open-spec code can run offline.
Have they patented the idea of using english words to encode numbers? Because I've seen patterns of 2-3 english words used in the past to communicate things like keys and confirmation codes.
What do you mean by that?
But if you're taking, say a telemetry point from a truck moving across the city and trying to map it to an address, there's going to be some drift in that number. And you're going to use that coordinate to say "what's the nearest house to this" – but due to that potential drift, you might match with a different house.
This is not life or death stuff. But then it becomes harder to "cluster" points together to say "all these datapoint correspond to this house". Having a slightly larger grid system allows you to say "anything in this 100sq foot square will be associated with this house" which allows you to have some margin of error, while still being able to address individual addresses.
So then instead of -72.883322, 38.128312 being treated differently from -72.883320, 38.128317, they all cluster around one "square" which makes it easy to just group them.
But What3Words is trying to give each of those "squares" a unique english word identifier, whereas other coordinate systems probably just use alphanumeric codes. I didn't know their algorithm was proprietary. That's bullshit because there is no "algorithm" per se – it's just mapping numbers to word lists. That's it.
But that's marketing.
If you just want to snap your coordinates to a grid, check s2 or h3 or just make your own grid in your country's authorative coordinate system or even snap your coordinates to a lower precision.
W3W is really dumb.
I wouldn’t say that W3W is dumb. I like the idea as a global mnemonic device. But it is a hard sell.