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Build a Better Netflix, Win a Million Dollars?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the trumps-our-redesign-contest dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In a quest to better movie recommendations, Netflix is opening their database (nytimes, registration and first child required) to users to try to craft a better recommendation technology. The problem is not easy. Says one researcher: 'You're competing with 15 years of really smart people banging away at the problem.'" Recommender systems are really an interesting problem, and that is likely very interesting data to play with.

2 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Re:database? by thatnerdguy · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.netflixprize.com/

    --
    I saw the Sign, and it opened up my eyes
  2. Re:Copy the Music Genome Project by vontrotsky · · Score: 4, Informative

    The problem with recommendation systems is that they use too little information to catagorize their subject.

    What they need to do is copy the methods of the Music Genome Project (www.pandora.com), and list a larger set of attributes for the films. This way it can recommend films by checking many more characteristics, such as director, tone, writer, or subject.

    In this contest, you run your own code and submit the results to NetFlix to be scored. This means that you can use any other data (e.g. A Movie Genome projct) you can compile to enhance your rankings. Netflix apparently specifically designed the contest to allow this.