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New Leader In Netflix Prize Race With One Day To Go

Posted by Soulskill on from the sniped-like-an-ebayer dept.

brajesh writes "The Netflix Prize, an algorithm competition to improve the Netflix Cinematch recommendation system by more than 10%, has a new leader — The Ensemble — just one day before the competition ends. The 30-day race to the end was kicked off after BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos submitted the first entry to break the 10% barrier, with the results showing a 10.08% improvement. The Ensemble, made up of three teams who chose to join forces ('Grand Prize Team,' 'Opera Solutions' and 'Vandelay United), has managed to overtake BellKor with a score of 10.09% — an improvement of .01% over the former leaders. From the article on Techcrunch: 'The competition will end [today], so teams still have a little bit of time left to make their last-second submissions, but things are looking good for The Ensemble. This has to be absolutely brutal for team BellKor.'"

11 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. I think by sys.stdout.write · · Score: 5, Insightful

    that other websites should do this as well.

    Slashdot, for instance, could have a contest to unbreak their fucking code by 10%.

    1. Re:I think by Vectronic · · Score: 3, Insightful

      (-1 Offtopic) But, I've sort of hoped that a site, such as Slashdot, should somehow open-source their site code, it a sort of "community", and considering the context of the site, the amount of users, there are probably about 5,000 people capable of contributing decent code/help, and there has to be a rather significant number of those that are willing to.

      Add a section devoted to it, then Polls, about which contribution should be implemented, etc. Articles/Submission are sort of (controlled) "open-source", why not the site itself?

  2. Why now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Why not wait another day before submitting the improvement? All they did now was giving the other team one day to respond, and if they succeed, I doubt they will be able to submit yet another improvement. So why not simply wait until an hour or so before the deadline, or am I missing something about the rules, e.g. any submitted improvements prolong the deadline by one day?

    1. Re:Why now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It does seem like a slight flaw in the rules if there is only one 30-day countdown timer. That is, if a competing team can hold off until the last moment to release their version that bests the current leader, as is the case here. Now that this improvement has been made public, there should be something like a 10-day response time for the other competing teams.

  3. Re:should've "gamed" it by stuckinarut · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who's to say they haven't? People smart enough to win this competition are probably smart enough to think of this.

  4. Re:should've "gamed" it by Manip · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This isn't eBay, they can't just magic high scores.

    If you game it or otherwise, everyone will end up submitting their max score, because, well... Why wouldn't they? Who cares if the other team knows you have 10.8%... Either they can beat it and will submit that score, or they cannot and won't.

  5. Re:Any winner at all? by ceoyoyo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why would that disqualify them? The didn't form multiple teams, they did the opposite -- they started with multiple teams and then merged them into one, abandoning or deleting the old, multiple accounts.

    I suppose you could speculate that the teams weren't ever independent, but I think that's fairly obviously not the case.

  6. Sometimes better design beats better algorythms by davidannis · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They could improve the predictive value immensely if they allowed me and my wife to each rank the movies we watch together separately. With the current system, some movies are rated by just me, some by just her, and some have a consensus rating. It leads to a dataset full of garbage.

    1. Re:Sometimes better design beats better algorythms by Hawke666 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That'd be all your fault. You should be creating separate account profiles for yourself and your wife.

    2. Re:Sometimes better design beats better algorythms by coaxial · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Data sets like this are always have garbage. There's the jackass that rates everything 5 stars. There's the jackass that rates everything 1 star. There's the jackass that rates the worst movies by consensus 5 stars, and vis versa.

      There are 61,441,618 ratings by 478,548 unique users in the publicly available training set.

      It just doesn't matter.

  7. Re:should've "gamed" it by Sancho · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't think that this contest is about honor.