Psychologist Beating Math Nerds in Race to Netflix Prize

s1d writes "An almost-anonymous British psychologist named Gavin Potter has suddenly risen to the top of the Netflix prize charts. With his very first attempt, he got a score which took the BellKor team seven months to reach. Currently at a score of 8.07, he has only five teams ahead of him now in the race for the ultimate Netflix algorithm. 'Potter says his anonymity is mostly accidental. He started that way and didn't come out into the open until after Wired found him. "I guess I didn't think it was worth putting up a link until I had got somewhere," he says, adding that he'd been seriously posting under the name of his venture capital and consulting firm, Mathematical Capital, for two months before launching "Just a guy." When he started competing, he posted to his blog: "Decided to take the Netflix Prize seriously. Looks kind of fun. Not sure where I will get to as I am not an academic or a mathematician. However, being an unemployed psychologist I do have a bit of time."'"

Comments

what a fraud

[nguy]

Netflix is paying peanuts to get a lot of research done for them. The people actually paying for this are the tax payers, who mostly pay the salaries of the contributors. And Netflix's conditions under which the prize money will be paid are odious.

Competitions can be a good thing when there is a reasonable business model attacked to it and if there is a chance of commercialization of a product to benefit everybody. But Netflix wants to own it all for next to no money.

Well the explenation is a LOT simpler

[SmallFurryCreature]

Netflix is an american company, that makes me presume you are an american. American's do NOT watch subs, you did. Netflix therefor assumes you like foreign movies. Its programmer did NOT include the option that you were simply a snob. It is an oversight, there are plenty of people who only watch movies from certain foreign countries, but Netflix apparently just considers you as a person willing to deal with foreign languages.

Oh and you taste is indeed lobsided, I too watch japanese movies, but also those from hong-kong, korea, china etc etc. Granted it is easier if you limit yourselve in some way, but I would welcome a system that would truly be capable of recommending movies of my taste and language would NOT be a criteria I want to be considered. I happily watch a signed movie, with subtitles of course how is that for irony!, if it was the kind I liked. Sadly no such system yet exists (I am not from the US so can't even try netflix).

You watch the movies to learn the language, fair enough but do you really expect a commercial company to accomodate your needs with a recommendation system? You don't need that you just need a searchable database that records the language.

A recommendation system is to recommend movies that fit your taste, not an absolute requirement. This is what makes it so hard. Say I like Whispers of the heart, a japanese animated coming of age movie. Should it then recommend to me other anime movies? No. Should it then recommend to me other japanese movies? No. Should it then recommend to me other coming of age movies? Almost! Should it recommend movies that have a similar feel to the one I liked? YES!

That is why it is so hard. Your requirements are simple and IMDB can do it for you, but recommending a movie based on a list of other movies you like without just listing the obvious is a LOT harder.