The secret behind this power is just a little bit of math.
If your brain operates more naturally in the English measurement system, 3 meters is about 9.8 feet.
This new approach to geocoding is useful for several reasons.
First, itsmore precisethan regular street addresses.
This makes the system well suited foremergency services.
Seeing these advantages, some car manufacturers are starting tointegrate what3words into their navigation systems.
The key concept is ordered triples.
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Remember: What3words is using 3-meter-by-3-meter squares, each of which contains 9 square meters of surface area.
So, working in the metric system, Earths surface area is equivalent to 510 trillion square meters.
An ordered triple is just a list of three things in which the order matters.
So brilliance.bronze.inputs would be considered a different ordered triple than bronze.brilliance.inputs.
Some scholarsestimate there are more a million English words; however, many of them are very uncommon.
But even using only common English words, there are still plenty to go around.
you’re free to find manyword listsonline.
The developers at what3words came up with a list of 40,000 English words.
(The what3words system works in50 different languageswith independently assigned words.)
The number of possible ordered triples would then be 40,000 times 40,000 times 40,000, which is 64 trillion.
That provides plenty of three random word triples to cover the globe.
National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)is also advocating their use as passwords.
Password selection and related security analysis are more complicated than attaching three words to small squares of the globe.
But a similar calculation is illuminating.
If you increase your word list beyond 40,000, youll get even more possible passwords.
Its important to note that there are afair number of trade-offsamong the different approaches topassword selection and complexity rules.
