Or is this essentially an easier to read/remember version of latitude/longitude?
I thought this would be about more clever pathfinding optimization in a part of the world where typical shortest-path optimizations are much harder.
[1] www.what3words.com
Quick, what direction do you go to get from combos.cove.split to reindeer.steak.rules? I made up the second address, but it highlights how completely useless what3words is for directions.
Worse than useless.
Quick, what direction do you go to get from 12.34567N, 12.34567W to 56.43210N, 23.87654E?
Not being able to immediately determine direction between 2 addresses isn't a failing.
It's a pretty simple piece of math.
[0]: https://www.greatcirclemapper.net/en/great-circle-mapper.htm...
But what3words is proprietary and requires licensing, while Google's codes are open source.
Disclaimer: I used to work on Google Maps, including geocoding, but not this initiative.
[0] https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...
- Similar to a phone number, the code can be reduced to the last 4 or 6 digits in practice, because the "area code" (in this case, "8GC2") selects a large region (approximately the size of a metropolitan area) and thus can be omitted if referring to destinations in your local area.
- The letters are selected to be minimally confusable with each other, so you don't need to use the NATO alphabet.
It's more like the hierarchical telephone numbering system. If you know it's local, the code can be much shorter. It doesn't need to be globally unique; just unique in the same city.