| Abstract: | The time-worn aphorism "close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades" is clearly inadequate. Close also counts in golf, shuffleboard, archery, darts, curling, and other games of accuracy in which hitting the precise center of the target isn't to be expected every time, or in which we can expect to be driven from the target by skilled opponents. This lecture is not devoted to sports discussions, but to efficient algorithms for determining pairs of closely related web pages--and a few other situations in which we have found that inexact matching is good enough; where proximity suffices. We will not, however, attempt to be comprehensive in the investigation of probabilistic algorithms, approximation algorithms, or even techniques for organizing the discovery of nearest neighbors.We are more concerned with finding nearby neighbors; if they are not particularly close by, we are not particularly interested. |
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