Assuming you have a retrieval task where you need to know the "nearest neighbours"-set or drill down to find the "one exactly matching"-entry among a vast number of entries.
These are completely different problems. To find exactly matching things, you can just serialize and use hashing. To find "close" things, you need a measure of "closeness," and a much more complicated data structure.
Speaking of bit-vectors: I don't know enough about the maturity of bit-vector related modules up on CPAN to judge if they are any good for production tasks.
vec and the bitwise string operators work pretty well.

In reply to Re: What is the best way to store and look-up a "similarity vector"? by educated_foo
in thread What is the best way to store and look-up a "similarity vector" (correlating, similar, high-dimensional vectors)? by isync

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