
Mongolia is changing all its addresses to three-word phrases - taylorbuley
http://qz.com/705273/mongolia-is-changing-all-its-addresses-to-three-word-phrases/
======
kragen
This is absolutely hilarious, at least to my inner six-year-old. They seem to
have filtered out words with obvious negative connotations like "ugly", words
of under four letters, and maybe longer words. But through the magic of
language, even very innocent words are subject to reinterpretation. And a lot
of What3Words's words are actually not that innocent.

glorified.bodily.passage is in some farmland in the Netherlands, near Wijk en
Aalburg:
[https://map.what3words.com/glorified.bodily.passage](https://map.what3words.com/glorified.bodily.passage)

beats.member.daily is in a gated community on Long Island:
[https://map.what3words.com/beats.member.daily](https://map.what3words.com/beats.member.daily)

tugging.bunny.organ is a farmhouse or suburban house in Hungary:
[https://map.what3words.com/tugging.bunny.organ](https://map.what3words.com/tugging.bunny.organ)

pigs.pigs.pigs is a vacant lot in Loveland, Colorado:
[https://map.what3words.com/pigs.pigs.pigs](https://map.what3words.com/pigs.pigs.pigs)

inflamed.flesh.massaged is some farmland near Stoke-on-Trent in England:
[https://map.what3words.com/inflamed.flesh.massaged](https://map.what3words.com/inflamed.flesh.massaged)

It's a lot worse in Spanish for some reason.

~~~
bambax
[https://map.what3words.com/credit.card.denied](https://map.what3words.com/credit.card.denied)
is in Ontario

[https://map.what3words.com/under.water.loans](https://map.what3words.com/under.water.loans)
is south of London

[https://map.what3words.com/shame.without.regret](https://map.what3words.com/shame.without.regret)
is in Norway

[https://map.what3words.com/regret.without.shame](https://map.what3words.com/regret.without.shame)
is in Alaska

[https://map.what3words.com/winter.winter.winter](https://map.what3words.com/winter.winter.winter)
is near Chicago

[https://map.what3words.com/summer.sunshine.happy](https://map.what3words.com/summer.sunshine.happy)
is in Beijing

[https://map.what3words.com/forgotten.previous.husband](https://map.what3words.com/forgotten.previous.husband)
is in the middle of the south Atlantic ocean

[https://map.what3words.com/imaginary.future.partner](https://map.what3words.com/imaginary.future.partner)
is somewhere in Russia

etc.

~~~
visarga
Even a small house has dozens of addresses. I checked and there is a different
address in my kitchen than my bathroom, based on what3words website. If you
find a certain combination offending, you can choose a different one, but on
the other hand, on a single property there could be thousands of addresses,
many of which funny or embarrassing.

~~~
xg15
Somewhat off-topic, but this seems to me like it could also be useful for
automated drone/self-driving car delivery in The Future (tm):

You could literally direct the packet to your front porch, balcony or whatever
else place is best for you to accept it.

~~~
patall
Or you just use geocoordinates like everyone else. This project is aimed to
make addresses more memorable for humans, machines do not have such a problem.

~~~
xg15
Machines do not. However, humans would find it difficult to memorize the GPS
coordinates for their front porch - which is why trying an approach like this
with pure GPS might not work.

------
rakoo
I really don't think it's a smart move to have a national entity totally
depend on a private company that has no plans to make its database freely
accessible for its operations; the worst being that said private company is
foreign, meaning that Mongolia has 0 leverage on how the database will evolve,
it is going to be completely at the mercy of What3Words' changes of policy and
access rights.

Unless What3Words' database is going to be fully accessible with no
restrictions for everyone, this really looks like a bad idea.

~~~
maxerickson
They can just appropriate the information.

I guess they might have to break some treaties or something to do that, but a
country isn't going to be beholden to a small foreign company for much of
anything.

~~~
themihai
TPP could change that

~~~
oh_sigh
Fairly certain neither Mongolia nor Britain are involved in the TPP

~~~
criley2
Britain is party to TTIP, very similar.

Mongolia has expressed limited sentiments towards joining TPP but they try to
remain neutral between the various regional and global factions, and being a
member of TPP could irritate their Russian and Chinese partners.

~~~
oh_sigh
TTIP is similar, but you might as well just say TTIP if you mean TTIP and not
TTP. Also, even if the UK is partner, Mongolia certainly can't be, at least to
this particular partnership.

------
Scaevolus
40,000 words gives 15.29 bits per word, for a 45.86 bit locator. log2(area of
earth / 9m^2) is 45.7.

Packing bits into phrases is also useful for passwords
([https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/](https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/)), but in
my experience the increased difficulty of correctly remembering phrases from a
large wordlist outweighs the additional entropy.

4 words chosen from a 2800-word list would convey the same amount of
information, and be less prone to confusion.

It looks like they're not attempting to make the triplets have consistent
meanings between languages, which makes sense -- 40,000 word correspondences
between 10 languages would be exceedingly difficult! logs.broker.remote is
sweight.saum.zulässige is lodos.pasado.ninguno, none of which are the same
meanings.

Another improvement would be a hierarchical system-- you can specify a more
coarse location using more common words -- picking from a wordlist of 500 for
a 4km^2 specifier, 2000 for for a 16 acre plot, 10000 for a 500m^2 area.

~~~
Bromskloss
> Packing bits into phrases is also useful for passwords
> ([https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/](https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/)), but in
> my experience the increased difficulty of correctly remembering phrases from
> a large wordlist outweighs the additional entropy.

I saw a paper with a nice method for generating passphrases. Unfortunately, I
can't find it. (Can anyone help me?)

First, you generate random data with enough entropy for a passphrase. Then,
instead of encoding it in a sequence of words that is as short as possible,
you encode it in many (say, a million) sequences that are a bit longer. Each
sequence thus encode the same data. Now, you feed all these sequences through
an algorithm that gives each sequence a score depending on how close it is to
being a natural-language phrase. Finally, you present the user with the
sequences, ordered by their score, and let the user choose any one of the to
use as passphrase.

~~~
kerkeslager
> I saw a paper with a nice method for generating passphrases. Unfortunately,
> I can't find it. (Can anyone help me?)

DiceWare[1] doesn't do the filtering you're talking about, but it does provide
a method of generating passphrases by converting entropy into words. PGP Word
Lists[2] use a packing technique as well, with even/odd words for error
detection.

I haven't seen the paper you're talking about, but I'm highly suspicious of
using an algorithm to score phrases by how close to natural language they are
without a proof of security.

If you score natural-ness using, for example, comparing overlapping 2-word
patterns to a database, then that database becomes a Markov chain database we
can use to generate passphrase guesses, greatly reducing the entropy.
Generating and discarding the patterns database from natural language material
for each passphrase generation helps only inasmuch as two source databases
from the same language are likely to differ. Maybe that's not the method used
to test natural-ness, but I suspect that the better the natural-ness scoring
function is, the better the corresponding passphrase generator will be. And
remember, the user is going to decrease entropy even further by choosing their
passphrase.

You can mitigate this by decreasing the number of passwords generated for the
user to choose from, but this means less natural phrases. You can also
mitigate it by increasing the passphrase space (that is, more words in your
passphrase) but that decreases memorability.

Personally, I use 5-word DiceWare passphrases for most things, and 6-word
DiceWare passphrases for the most important stuff. The proof of security for
DiceWare is simple enough that you can do it yourself and be confident in it.
The intent is not long-term memorability--in the age of leaked passwords
stored or transferred in plaintext, password reuse is foolish, and I've yet to
come across a scheme that allows me to memorize 30+ passwords. Instead the
idea is short-term memorability so I can copy the passwords manually from my
password manager. In practice the memorability is completely adequate for this
purpose.

And even at 5 DiceWare-generated words, that's 2.8x10^19 possibilities, or a
little under a year for an attacker with 1 trillion guesses per second
capabilities.

[1]
[http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html](http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list)

~~~
Bromskloss
> I'm highly suspicious of using an algorithm to score phrases by how close to
> natural language they are without a proof of security.

To clarify, all the phrases to be scored represent the same random data. They
are just more or less difficult to remember. The natural-language algorithm is
just there to help you find one that is easy to remember, and is not security
critical. The algorithm is assumed to be known to be known to the attacker in
any case.

------
Aaron1011
One problem I see is that one particular address may end up with several
3-word addresses. Since physical distance doesn't affect the similarity of the
combinations, how is one to determine the 'correct' combination for a
particular location? This seems to compound the inherent problem of all 3-word
combinations sharing the same namespace - I have no idea if two addresses are
actually the same building, or on opposite sides of the planet.

~~~
maxerickson
For most things the adjacent addresses would be equivalent. It doesn't matter
which part of the house a package is delivered to. In many cases someone
picking an address won't really be able to get within 3 meters anyway.

I guess people looking at several addresses won't be looking at the words,
they will have to have a resolver and look at them that way.

~~~
pavel_lishin
But it might matter if you're delivering five packages, and your system lists
five addresses, even though they're all going to the same building.

~~~
ygjb
This remains a solved problem. The location phrase specifies the coarse
location. Additional addressing information is used to introduce granularity.
Look at how addresses are conventionally written already, and in a good chunk
of the world, the addresses are written top to bottom, most specific to least
specific. The largest remaining problem is that the location mapping depends
on a proprietary database, but this is a common problem (in Canada the
database of postal codes is also proprietary).

~~~
bhandziuk
that's mostly true, except US/Canada we put the zip/postal code at the end
which is more specific than the city/state/province. But your gist remains
true.

~~~
ygjb
True, but do note that postal codes and ZIP codes are a recent adoption, only
deployed in US/UK/Canada since the 1960s

The history of post addresses is quite interesting in it's own right :)

------
anc84
FYI, their patent is probably bogus:
[http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-
inven...](http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-invented-and-
published-before-this-patent-application-how-do-i-get-it-in)

------
trescube
They should just use [http://what2numbers.org/](http://what2numbers.org/)

~~~
pavel_lishin
I genuinely can't tell if that's an honest attempt at competition, or a
parody.

~~~
jamesfe
Meters from 0N/0S. And with that awesomely similar design...must be a parody!

~~~
nkozyra
I wonder why not just lat/lon for added ironic effect.

------
chrischen
So people in Mongolia will use English words for addresses? The whole "easy to
remember" is completely lost when it's a foreign language.

Imagine if America switched to three Chinese characters for an "easy to
remember" address system.

In China numbers are often used inside of roman character email addresses, or
domains, because roman characters are only convenient for westerners, much
less _English words_.

See 1688.com (alibaba.com), or use of QQ numbers for email addresses.

~~~
linkregister
Thankfully now there is the IDN extension to DNS to use punycode to represent
other character sets.

I agree with your original point that it is strange that the Mongol Post would
want to use English words for addressing.

Edit: they support other languages; I assume they would add Mongolian to the
list.

------
prof_hobart
Hmm.

A word with one letter difference from my house (in the English midlands) puts
the address in the middle of mountains in western China.

It's annoying enough when a parcel gets delivered to an address near me
because the delivery driver can't tell where my road ends and another one
starts. But I'm not going to China to pick up my next Amazon order when
someone miskeys.

~~~
xg15
I would think (if this is always the case) it's more a feature than a bug: If
you're a parcel service and ordered to ship a packet to a location in the US,
you'll (hopefully) stop and think if the address appears to be in china. If
the address were "just" in the wrong US state, on the other hand, you might
have more trouble with it.

Of course that implies that the delivery service knows the supposed country of
destination and that it cares. So I guess, should this way of addressing
places catch on, we should probably make it a four-word phrase and also
include the state with it.

------
kibwen
The idea is quite interesting, but the implementation only makes sense for
sparsely-populated regions. An apartment in the city with two side-by-side
doors to different units will easily fit within a three-meter square, meaning
that you'll still require "Apt. #1, Apt. #2" designations to disambiguate.
Similarly, the fact that this system accounts only for geographical surface
coordinates means that any building with distinct addresses stacked
vertically, like an apartment building, won't be able to be served by this
system alone.

~~~
hx87
Apartment units addresses will probably be based on the 3x3 square the most
closely matches its outline, so door location will be irrelevant. Vertical
stacks can be simply dealt with by assuming a standard 3 or 4 meter story, so
unless you live in an industrial loft or something it won't be a problem.

~~~
dalke
Door location is how you can tell if a house is in the Netherlands or in
Belgium, for Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog. Move the door and you move
countries.

Outline is not time invariant. If I turn a duplex into a single family, or
build out, then the shape changes. If I live in Coober Pedy and build out
underground, then do I use the surface outline or the underground outline?

If I relocate the house a few meters away, the address definitely changes.

Really, this is best for the billions of people who have _no_ address. Most
likely it will boot-strap, so in 100 years the name "X.Y.Z" will refer to the
ghost of the place that once was, but everybody local knows what it now means,
as will the databases. With a layer of apt. #1, #2, etc. on top of that.

------
franciscop
There was a really cool project using syllables such as consonant+vowel, then
using two "words" with 3 syllables each such as:

"tapiku norami"

But the cool thing is that they were basically real gps coordinates just
encoded as letters, so returning them to the original was trivial. I think a
couple of letters were avoided to avoid confussion.

Unfortunately I cannot remember the name and they did a terrible SEO job...

~~~
vinc
You could also use Lojban's numbering system[1] for example with GPS
coordinates in decimal form to the same effect.

[1]:
[https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lojban/Numbers](https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lojban/Numbers)

------
rl3
"alien.crash.landing"[0] is a remote farm field in Montana. Just the kind of
place you'd expect.

"lower.life.expectancy"[1] is some patch of land in Colorado. I can't help but
notice the two man-made pits containing unknown substances a few hundred
meters north.

[0] [http://w3w.co/alien.crash.landing](http://w3w.co/alien.crash.landing)

[1] [http://w3w.co/lower.life.expectancy](http://w3w.co/lower.life.expectancy)

------
forkandwait
I looked at the website, and couldn't figure out what makes this a good
idea... Especially compared to geohashing.

~~~
tantalor
Geohashes are not human friendly. It's easy to screw up a geohash when
transferring it.

~~~
forkandwait
I don't think meaningless combinations of three words are particularly human
friendly either...

~~~
superuser2
They are. Remembering a three-word phrase is not remotely difficult compared
to remembering a long pseudorandom string.

~~~
discreditable
Ironically, the article manages to mess this up.

> the Stade de France is at reporter.smoked.received

The phrase they mention goes to some place in Trenton, Missouri[1]. It seems
they meant reporter.smoker.received[2].

[1]
[https://map.what3words.com/reporter.smoked.received](https://map.what3words.com/reporter.smoked.received)

[2]
[https://map.what3words.com/reporter.smoker.received](https://map.what3words.com/reporter.smoker.received)

~~~
saalweachter
I was actually reasonably impressed with the system; they don't put nearby
words near each other, so if you have a typo it becomes pretty obvious to
anything but the most braindead delivery system.

So if what you're writing on the envelope is

    
    
        Bob Smith
        reporter.smoked.received
        France
    

it becomes trivial to correct that to reporter.smoker.received, unlike when
you write "124 Main Street" instead of "123 Main Street".

~~~
discreditable
To what3words' credit, when I typed reporter.smoker.received into the map
tool, it did suggest the correct location in its list of similar locations.
[https://imgur.com/G2ChrxA.png](https://imgur.com/G2ChrxA.png)

------
chasing
Great idea, until your address is something like "persistent.ugly.pancake"
"white.power.manatee..."

~~~
bryanlarsen
Unless your yard is less than 3 square meters, you'll have more than one
phrase for your address. Enumerate all the possible phrases, and choose the
coolest one...

~~~
visarga
That means everyone has a pretty high probability to have a stupid address in
their "bag-of-addresses".

------
brechmos
I didn't see any discussion in the article of having different languages but
the what three word website talks about it.

One thing that I don't quite understand is two locations very near each other
have completely different sets of words. I would have thought there would be
some sort of hierarchy of words (sort of like geocoding a lat long where it
defines a box and the precision of the geocoding gives you larger or smaller
boxes).

I wonder too if there are going to be collisions of words and locations that
aren't going to make people too happy. Though they must have thought through
that too.

Either way it is an interesting idea.

~~~
mikeash
If Wikipedia is to be believed, that's intentional as an error-detecting
mechanism:

"The result is that if you enter athree-word combination slightly incorrectly
and the result is still a valid w3w reference, the location will be so far
away from the user’s intended area that it will be immediately obvious to both
a user and an intelligent error-checking system."

I'm skeptical of just how well that'll work, personally. Witness the example
of the truck driver who drove to Gibraltar, England instead of the one next to
Spain.

~~~
mhurron
It did say intelligent error checking. People have proven themselves to be
idiots.

------
yegle
Google developed a similar coding system called Plus Code
[https://plus.codes/](https://plus.codes/)

~~~
linkregister
This seems way easier to use. Also a postal service wouldn't have to do
anything except open the website on the postal carriers' phones.

------
Pamar
I have some doubts.

a) suppose I am in Apt #312 in Bellevue Mansion, Whatever Street 23, San Jose,
California.

Apt. #311 is on a wildly different set, so how can I find out we are
neighbours? Or how can I explain to someone where Whatever Street #21 is?

b) what if I have the same 3-words square, but you are on floor #7 and I am on
floor #11?

~~~
jessriedel
Address is pretty separate from directions in both the old and new system. The
fact that I'm on Maple st. doesn't tell me anything about how close I am to
Pine st., except in a small number of cities that have a useful naming system.
So I say "Turn left on Maple, then right on Pine, then...". Likewise, here you
say "turn right at maple.big.grumpy, then left at green.thick.rat".

This system is an improvement for locations with _no road names_ (so it's not
any harder to give directions) or with _ubiquitous GPS_ (where you can
directly convert). The number of places with road names but not ubiquitous GPS
is on the fast decline.

~~~
Pamar
Maybe I am just dumb but I cannot really understand the "Address is pretty
separate from directions in both the old and new system". You usually know
where you live (i.e. how to get there) so the only reason you need to have
some kind of coordinate system (be it "conventional" or the one we are
discussing) is to tell someone other, including the postman, how to get to
you.

I.e. - I really do not understand why "Hi Ibrahim, I live at Alpha-Unicorn-
Honey, just drop here when you are in the area" would beat "The train stops at
Nadira, from there you walk 2 miles in the direction of the sunset, when you
reach a rock looking like a kneeling woman you turn in the direction of the
face and walk anoter mile - and there is my hut".

So far the only place where I believe this system would help is in large
Japanese cities (Tokyo) etc. because they don't have "named" streets, most of
the time, and at the same time most people can be expected to have access to
technology.

(Maybe it's the same in China, but never been there so I don't know how it is)

I sincerely doubt that people living on the outskirts of the Gobi desert will
routinely exchange their three-words coordinates over whatsapp and then get
Google Maps or whatever to guide them to the desired destination.

~~~
jessriedel
> I really do not understand why "Hi Ibrahim, I live at Alpha-Unicorn-Honey,
> just drop here when you are in the area" would beat "The train stops at
> Nadira, from there you walk 2 miles in the direction of the sunset, when you
> reach a rock looking like a kneeling woman you turn in the direction of the
> face and walk anoter mile - and there is my hut".

You misunderstand. It's not trying to be better at directions, it's trying to
be better at unambiguously specifying a location. If you're mailing something
to someone where there are no roads, then this gives you a way to address them
with more precision than you could do before. You just need a postman with a
$40 smart phone with GPS (or a look-up-table).

You should really think about this as "easy to remember and communicate GPS
coordinates".

------
ilaksh
[https://github.com/google/open-location-
code/blob/master/doc...](https://github.com/google/open-location-
code/blob/master/docs/comparison.adoc#open-location-code)

------
Grue3
The article lists Mongolian US embassy address as "constants.stuffy.activism",
except the map they link to gives me the address "indoor.sheepish.blues". How
can it be an address if it changes with time?

~~~
waterphone
It doesn't. It's a grid system with 3 meter squares, each one having its own
trio of words. Move the point 3 meters in any direction and you'll get a
different one. This allows much more precise and close together addresses,
down to the entrances of doors or gates.

------
dmuth
So it's like DNS for GPS coordinates. Neat!

~~~
krallja
Yes, except unlike DNS, it's centralized into a single database and you may
have to pay a license fee to read from it.

~~~
creshal
It can't be that hard to reverse engineer the algorithm, can it?

~~~
rakoo
It's not hard, but it's unsurprisingly against the ToS
([http://developer.what3words.com/api/licence/](http://developer.what3words.com/api/licence/))

"You shall not use the API for any application that replicates or attempts to
replace the essential user experience of the Service or use the API to create
a Product which functions substantially the same as the API and offer it for
use by third parties. You must not pre-fetch, cache, index, copy, re-utilise,
extract or store any what3words Data"

~~~
mort96
That only mentions using their API, not reverse engineering the algorithm.

~~~
rakoo
... which is patented (see the other thread), so you're opening a whole
another can of worms that frankly doesn't sound much better.

------
ficklepickle
Check out the Mongolia episode of the Canadian show "Don't drive here" if you
don't get why this is better for them than the status quo.

Spoiler: Every citizen gets a parcel of land in Mongolia where they can put up
a yurt. These yurt neighborhoods are nearly impossible to navigate if you
don't live there (IIRC)

------
pinouchon
[https://map.what3words.com/pretty.code.running](https://map.what3words.com/pretty.code.running)
=> right where my office is located (for real). Couldn't be happier about
that.

------
dikei
This reminds me of the Automated Curse Generator from DailyWtf

[http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Automated-Curse-
Generato...](http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Automated-Curse-Generator)

------
dekobon
I'm disappointed that they didn't use Mongolian words for the 3 words.

~~~
etjossem
They did.

> Users can look up these three-word locations, which have been translated
> into Mongolian, for free on the What3Words website or app.

------
orbitingpluto
Homonyms? Vertical addressing?

So do you live at peak.pique.peek, or peak.peek.pique? Or is it... What floor?
Oh, you're on the top floor? So you leave on the peak of pique.peak.peek?

~~~
joeyh
Also they use both plural and singular nouns, and hash them to different
locations.

------
aestetix
Wow. I spent a lot of time thinking about names and how they influence us.
This has to be one of the stupidest ideas I have ever seen. They are just
throwing out hundreds if not thousands of years of nomenclature etymology and
replacing it with three randomly chosen english words.

Even Vonnegut's idea of reassigning everyone new last names in Slapstick made
more sense than this.

------
ralf07
I wonder how units/apartments in multi storey buildings are adressed.

------
philliphaydon
Singapore is a tiny island but it's system is Super easy. It uses post codes
assigned to physical buildings. From a post code you can get the name of the
building, street, and access.

------
srtjstjsj
[http://openlocationcode.com/](http://openlocationcode.com/)

------
gonvaled
Why english?

~~~
krallja

        Users can look up these three-word locations,
        which have been translated into Mongolian,
        for free on the What3Words website or app.
    

See also:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words#Design_principles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words#Design_principles)

~~~
tantalor
The words were literally translated? That makes no sense... the meaning of the
words is not important.

~~~
DanBC
What's easier for you to remember -

    
    
        ample.estate.racing 
    

or

    
    
        хангалттай.хөрөнгийн.уралдааны

~~~
gonvaled
The fact that you are even asking that is prove of the level of arrogance that
the anglospeaking part of the world has reached.

~~~
DanBC
Sorry, you misunderstand me.

If you read eg cyrillic you're going to find it very much easier to read and
remember cyrillic words. Thus, presenting cyrillic to those people benefits
them. That's why translating from English to local languages is a good thing.

~~~
gonvaled
Sorry, I indeed misunderstood you!

------
middleq
edgy.puns.lake

~~~
middleq
roughest.tickles.bath

~~~
middleq
Putting aside the potentially bad combinations, i feel as tho a hierarchical
schema with the potential for arbitrary accuracy may be more suitable.

~~~
touristtam
At the same time it makes the news a bit more entertaining:
keychain.limbs.youth

------
ilaksh
I like mapcodes better: see mapcode.com

~~~
zelos
I thought the same thing. They have the advantage of being public domain and a
lot shorter.

------
bane
Why oh why is it so hard for countries to just apply a sensible addressing
scheme? This is simply an attempt to simplify using coordinates with something
more memorable. But now it's locked into a proprietary service and doesn't
solve sub-unit addressing or routing. But whatever, I guess it's better than
the current system which is basically a free form description of what somebody
hopes the mail carrier can figure out.

This is a such a stupidly simple problem that it's become a pet peeve of mine
whenever I see a place that hasn't been bothered to figure it out.

Here's 2 perfectly workable schemes that are used the world over (this is a
free service I put into the public domain for the betterment of all humanity).

Scheme 1

1) Divide your country into postal zones, assign each one a number or an
alphanumeric or whatever. Call these "zip codes" or "postal codes" or whatever
the hell you want. Bonus, when routing mail, you route them only between these
zones at the national level, and then let local offices handle the last mile
figuring out of where something is supposed to be sent.

2) Name (or for goodness sake at least number) each road -- or do both. If
your language or culture is unable to come up with enough interesting names
for all of the roads in your country, it's okay, you can reuse names in
different postal zones so long as a road doesn't cross between zones in which
case you get to only use it once.

3) Number all of the land plots along a road. Final delivery from the postal
system is to the land plot number. This works because every nation on the
planet has some kind of system to track land ownership, and it's usually some
kind of number.

4) Final delivery of mail is handled by people who subdivide that land plot.
Addresses may contain some identifier of subunits on that landplot, but the
postal delivery organization doesn't have to care.

Addresses are now of the form:<zip code>:<road id>:<land plot id>:<sub-unit id
(optional)>:<Name to deliver to optional>

Some examples:

1543:Genghis Khan Street:16B-321:Unit C AZJ542:5123:1313:Mr. Altangerel
District 213:Morinhuur Rd.:2116:Apartment 116:Anun Chinbat

The country can figure out if they want to use numbers, names, alphanumerics,
whatever. But this isn't rocket science. This is the typical addressing scheme
used most places that haven't completely lost their minds, just the fields are
usually ordered the other way round.

Scheme 2

1) Divide the country into zones.

2) Divide those zones into zones.

3) Keep doing this until zones are guaranteed to be small enough to track the
smallest allowable land plot. This is where the mail gets delivered by the
formal system. Routing works by going up and down the hierarchy.

4) Final delivery of mail is handled by people who subdivide that land plot.
Addresses may contain some identifier of subunits on that landplot, but the
postal delivery organization doesn't have to care.

Addresses are now of the form:<Major subunit>:<Minor subunit>:<Local
subunit>:<sub-unit id (optional)>:<Name to deliver to optional>

This system works well where roads aren't guaranteed and/or the country can't
be bothered with naming the roads because of reasons. This is also a
surprisingly common system in many places, but often gets eventually replaced
with the scheme above.

AB:612:AJR 14-23:District 9:Khorkhog Place:Apartment 612-F:Mr. Tsedenbal
Bayar:Damdin:Bogd:Yurt 5

Again, not rocket science. Easier to remember than coordinates and precise
enough for mail delivery. Postal areas can be aligned with existing
administrative zones, or whatever.

I remember being in Ireland and getting pretty annoyed trying to find anything
because all anybody had for addresses outside of the big cities were
coordinates. Yet nearly every road had at least a number, and Ireland is
already pretty well divided into various administrative districts. So why the
hell were we receiving nonsense like coordinates?

Asked the locals and the answer was some sort of tie up between the government
and the postal system had delayed it forever. This was in 2013.

That's correct, a developed country, in the 21st century, couldn't be bothered
to figure out a proper addressing system. (Apparently this has since been
fixed, but seriously, why the fuck did it take that long?)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland#Introduction_of_a_national_system)

Things not to do:

\- Make your postal codes proprietary or under copyright or some other stupid
nonsense.

\- Use a system with such low precision that it ends up going free-form text
for local delivery. I'm aware of parts of England with such nonsense.

\- Change the scheme over and over again. Pick one, implement it and be done
with it.

\- Use a system that doesn't aid in navigation at the local level. If I'm at
local subunit 241, I can expect to find 240, 242, 243 and such nearby, while
893, 1023 and so on should be far away.

\- Use land plot numbers that don't make any sense. In many places odd numbers
will be on one side of a road and even will be on another. In some places,
it's a different scheme. These schemes make sense and aid in navigation,
random numbers don't.

\- Don't use this kind of word-based scheme, it'll end up full of dick jokes
and racial slurs without anybody knowing it, and it means entire swaths of the
Earth will have to be nonsensically renamed over and over again due to
regional slang phrases about people's mothers.

Again, this is free advice for anybody trying to start a national postal
system, because apparently, here in the future of the 21st century, some
places haven't bothered to sort themselves out yet.

~~~
Hondor
Many of your reasons disappear when everyone has a smartphone. The software
can convert whatever representation of a location into whatever description
helps find it. That I think is better than locking "directions to help the
postman" into the address itself. The postman's app can tell him how to find
your street.

The idea of what 3 words is that it's easy to remember. Your suggestions are
not. That's a massive weakness.

~~~
bane
For fun, try to get you and your friends to spend a few weeks trying to just
use coordinates to get around. At several points, try to do it assuming no
data connectivity, like what you'd experience in most of Mongolia. Hell, you
can experience it in most of Colorado.

It turns out it's a terribly designed addressing system, replacing the numbers
with words doesn't make it less terrible, only more memorable.

Assume your magic navigation device goes down, but you can call the
destination you are going to and have them give you directions without using
street names or designators, only landmarks. Try it from varying distances
away. Instead of "turn left at Main st." you'll get "turn left at the second
red building, I think, maybe the one with the white window shutters...you
don't see one with white window shutters? well they have a restaurant next
door with a neon sign...okay after that take the 3rd left, or is it the 4th?"

Or try to figure out not only which building you need to go to in a dense
urban core, but which side of the street the building is on? While the
coordinates you got put you within 3 meters of the building, the magic map
device you're using can't get a lock on more than 2 GPS satellites at once and
you're now 30 meters away from your destination.

Okay, so now you make it, and it's a 30 story building with 300 apartments.
Which one is it? The coordinates get you near the base of the building, but
not to the unit itself?

But that's okay, nobody's bothered to do something sensible like put numbers
on their doors, or label the streets so when your app doesn't work you can
still locally navigate. You can always wait around for a postman to arrive and
ask him.

------
KaiserPro
so they are going to use english words for their postal system?

doesn't sound very Chinese government to me. This has a hefty smell of
bollocks to me.

~~~
chrischen
Mongolia is separate from China, however I brought up this same point since
their language isn't English (it's Mongolian).

~~~
KaiserPro
My mistake, I'd assumed that it had been absorbed into china.

Turns out I was confusing that with Tibet. Embarrassing to say the least...

------
HoopleHead
Not this moronic shit again! Just let it die, fer Gawd's sake!

[https://stiobhart.net/2016-01-15-stupidest-idea-
ever](https://stiobhart.net/2016-01-15-stupidest-idea-ever)

~~~
Sone7
If you think :that's: dumb, check out the "Eircode" address System that
Ireland's government spent an 8 figure sum on:
[http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/analysis/lost-and-
fo...](http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/analysis/lost-and-found-
addressing-the-myriad-problems-with-eircode-312711.html)

~~~
rmc
Eircodes were created that way so that people wouldn't have to change their
address at all. Which could be a politically difficult thing. Politicians
choose the thing that made their life easier and stopped complaints.

