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

Moving target?

[ktappe]

Will Netflix incorporate the near-winners' ideas into their current system? If so, won't future teams be aiming at a moving (improving) target? If not, won't current Netflix customers know that their recommendations could be better if Netflix just incorporated a now publicly-disclosed algorithm into their servers?

Re:I'd say...

[bigbigbison]

I think the problem is that (and I may be wrong) any new system that researchers come up with isn't allowed to ask the user for more information. This would make if very hard for any system to be acurate if it is based soley on what dvds you rented and how you rated them.
If I liked Die Hard 4, for example, did I like it because of Bruce Willis, the "I'm a Mac" guy, the special effects, the plot, or some other reason that even I don't know?
Personally, I know that I have rated something like 900 movies on the netflix site and nearly all the recommendations are things I've no interest in or they simply say, "Sorry we have no recommendations for you at this time."
I would like to think that if they could ask me why I rated one movie a 4 and another a 1 then they might have more accurate recommendations. Even if they just had a drop down menu with something like, "I liked this movie because of a) the starts, b) the plot, c) the genre and so on" it would make recommendations a lot easier.