What’s The Story With HNSW?

Exploring the path to fast nearest neighbour search with Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds

Image created by DALL·E 2 with the prompt “A bright abstract expressionist painting of a layered network of dots connected by lines.”

Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) has become popular as one of the best performing approaches for approximate nearest neighbour search. HNSW is a little complex though, and descriptions often lack a complete and intuitive explanation. This post takes a journey through the history of the …

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