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0 pointssakjur2y ago0 comments

I’ve heard that argument. I’m also skeptical about its weight compared to the benefits of locality. When what3words says it, I feel like it’s a salespitch as to why we should use their proprietary solution.

I think your checkmoji solves that problem in its entirety more elegantly. Would a fifth word make it error correcting rather than error detecting?

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kybernetikos2y ago· 1 in thread

I did look at error correction - it'd be cool to have e.g. a any 4 from 5 words scheme, but for all the schemes I know, you'd need a good few more words than that to make it work.

I actually have come round really to thinking that a fifth word is probably a better approach than the emoji, although the emoji is more fun. Problem with emojis is that not all of them are easy to describe, and I think audio/speech rather visual is the key here.

Each word for my word list is 12 bits of information, so for a check word, it could have 3 bits for error checking each of the location words. which would certainly let me highlight which word was wrong, and may even enable me to suggest words that might correct it.

kybernetikos2y ago

So I'd been thinking about something fancy like Shamir's secret sharing or some other threshold scheme, but actually, an xor check word is still really good - not only does it check, but if you know that only a single word was wrong and which it was, it can recover that word, or if you don't know which word but are confident it was only one, then you can narrow it down to just 4 possible locations, which will probably be good enough to identify the actual location most of the time.

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