Close but no Cigar for Netflix Recommender System

Ponca City, We Love You writes "In October 2006, Netflix, the online movie rental service, announced that it would award $1 million to the first team to improve the accuracy of Netflix's movie recommendations by 10% based on personal preferences. Each contestant was given a set of data from which three million predictions were made about how certain users rated certain movies and Netflix compared that list with the actual ratings and generated a score for each team. More than 27,000 contestants from 161 countries submitted their entries and some got close, but not close enough. Today Netflix announced that it is awarding an annual progress prize of $50,000 to a group of researchers at AT&T Labs, who improved the current recommendation system by 8.43 percent but the $1 million grand prize is still up for grabs and a $50,000 progress prize will be awarded every year until the 10 percent goal is met. As part of the rules of the competition, the team was required to disclose their solution publicly. (pdf)"

Comments

Re:like trying to win the lottery

[MBCook]

Two reasons I can think of. One is the challenge. I like to code but I'm not great with coming up with projects to do myself. This kind of thing would be nice for that.

The other is the experience. If you get second in this, no, you won't win the prize. But you can bet that having that on your resume would make getting many jobs much easier. Amazon would like your skills. So would many other retailers.

Also, as a side note, it's not a lottery. There is a three prong legal test in the US to determine if something is a lottery. I think the three parts are you have to pay to get it, everyone has an equal chance of winning, and there is no skill involved. I'm not positive about the second part. This is free to enter and is based quite a bit on skill, so it's not like a lottery.

Don't exaggerate.

This isn't a way to get free work. It's a way to get very smart job candidates to find you. It's a recruiting tool. You don't honestly think that they will take the winning idea, pay the $1m, and then just say "bye" do you? They will offer that person a job if at all reasonable (if it's a team of 500 students, obviously they couldn't).