3 ms·

I think it's something related to the curse of dimensionality [1] [2], basically just a property of high dimensional spaces (perhaps only certain kinds of space

• hedora 5y ago
  The intrinsic dimensionality of a dataset is also relevant here. The M-Tree is one of my favorite indexes. It works with data that's embedded in infinite dimensional spaces (sometimes; it's bumping up against an impossibility result that's sketched in a sibling comment).
• bo1024 5y ago
  Yes. Even though almost every all pairs of points are almost a full diameter away from each other, they are also almost all almost orthogonal (i.e. the angle they make with the center of the sphere is very close to 90 degrees).