GoKawiilEssay maps how BM25's Stephen Robertson and Hokusai spent decades refining one core idea
A May 2026 blog post collects examples of people who spent decades iterating on a single idea before reaching their defining work. It traces Stephen Robertson's path from a 1976 probabilistic relevance paper with Karen Sparck Jones to the 1994 BM25 formula still used in search today, and cites Hokusai's decades of studying nature before painting The Great Wave off Kanagawa at 73.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The piece pushes back against the myth of sudden breakthroughs, showing that foundational tools like BM25—still core to modern search and retrieval-augmented AI systems—emerged from a slow, incremental refinement process spanning nearly two decades. It's a reminder that lasting innovations, whether technical or artistic, often come from sustained obsession with one problem rather than a single flash of insight.
- BM25, a ranking formula still used in search engines and RAG pipelines, took Stephen Robertson from 1976 to 1994 to develop fully.
- His early 1976 work with Karen Sparck Jones focused on term discrimination, later evolving to include term frequency and document length.
- The essay pairs this with Hokusai's decades-long study of nature before creating The Great Wave off Kanagawa, framing mastery as a long iterative process.
Introduction to Information Retrieval (Manning, Raghavan, Schütze) — If Robertson's decades-long march from probabilistic weighting to BM25 fascinated you, this is the classic textbook that lays out ranking functions, term weighting, and inverted indexes in one place. It's the standard reference for anyone wanting to understand search from first principles rather than folklore.
See Introduction to Information Retrieval (Manning, Raghavan, Schütze) on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: nityasnotes.com, 2026-09-03
Published there as: “People that worked on the same idea for decades”
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