Embeddings & vector search, from scratch
Embeddings & vector search, from scratch
Search lab: forty-two records become unit vectors of 384 float32 coordinates, 1,536 bytes each, and similarity becomes the angle between two arrows. Brute force scores all 42 (16,128 multiply-adds) and is correct by construction; on 1,024 records the layered graph reaches recall@10 0.9833 at ef=40 while touching 223.2 records, 21.79% of a scan, against 0.9875 for 372.6 at ef=100. Then the failures a vector cannot fix: "what does E4021 mean" returns its answer at rank 8 behind six incident records at 0.2273, because E4021 and E4022 sit 0.997252 apart, and the unanswerable question still returns ten rows whose best cosine is 0.0394.
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