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Netflix Prize Contest Ends, Down To the Wire
suraj.sun updates us on the Netflix Prize now that the competition has officially closed. We discussed the new leader with one day to go in the contest: The Ensemble, taking the lead from long-time leader BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, the first contestant to submit an entry that broke the 10% barrier. In the contest's final day, BellKor re-took the lead with 20 minutes to go, then The Ensemble apparently pulled a Michael Phelps with 4 minutes to go, squeaking ahead by 0.01%. At least so the leaderboard claims — but those numbers are posted by the competing teams. The NY Times reports that an official winner will not be named until September — Netflix needs that much time to pore through the complex entries and read the code. Netflix contacted BellKor on Sunday to tell them the team remained in first place; The Ensemble has had no such notification.
They realized that all movies starring Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson were actually the same movie. The compression on that alone was enough.
There, fixed that for you.
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so how do you ascertain who won? all the teams won
No, they didn't, at all.
Any bozo can get 5% improvement. It's the last 5% that's tough. And, of that last 5%, the first 2.5% is cake, compared to the last 2.5%.
they should take the final prize money and try to fractionate each incremental improvement in the algorithm and proportionally dole out the money that aways. anything else is unfair
As someone who participated, but did not win, the first place team deserves the entire million (if not more). This was a race, and second place is the first loser.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
Netflix calculates the score shown on the leaderboard from a set of rating predictions submitted by a team. The team does not, and will not, know the correct answers. For testing their algorithms, the teams use another dataset. The two datasets, part of the package made available to the competitors, are known as "qualifying" and "probe".
No, they lost to a German wearing a polyurethane suit and then declared they wouldn't race any more until the suits are banned.
The reason BellKor is still first is that the published scores are irrelevant. The scores that matter for the prize are based on an unpublished data set known only to Netflix (to prevent people submitting answers that are optimized for the challenge data and work poorly on everything else). On this secret data set, BellKor's algorithm apparently performs better than The Ensemble's.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Where have you been?
[2009-07-26]New Leader In Netflix Prize Race With One Day To Go
[2009-07-26]Netflix Prize May Have Been Achieved
[2007-11-27]Anonymity of Netflix Prize Dataset Broken
[2007-11-14]Close but no Cigar for Netflix Recommender System
[2006-10-02]Build a Better Netflix, Win a Million Dollars?
[2008-11-22]Interest Still High In the Netflix Algorithm Competition
[2009-10-09]Netflix Prize Competitor Already Beats Netflix
etc..
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
According to the contest rules the winning algorithm will not be exclusive to Netflix but will be published to the public, so we all win.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
because we all need to provide movie suggestions to our millions of users?
Because there are many, many organizations who can effectively use a high quality, freely-available automatic preference identification system. Some aspects of the winner are probably very specific to movies, but I'm sure most of the core, and the underlying ideas, are relevant to any sort of preference identification and clustering.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I, for one, think that the Silverlight player is crap.
I have a dual-head machine with a very nice 1600x1200 IPS-panel NEC LCD as my primary monitor, and a nice (but far lesser) 24" 1920x1080 TN-panel Asus LCD as the secondary.
I want to pop up a Netflix show on the secondary monitor, full-screen, and continue to do stuff like read Slashdot on the other display. Silverlight has no problem putting good-quality video up, full-screen, on the second display -- but as soon as I click outside that window (ie, to browse Slashdot), it shrinks back down to windowed mode. My dual-head computer is therefore retarded into being effectively a single-head machine for the duration of the film, unless I either want to watch it in a little window or soak up a couple of cores worth of CPU power zooming in with Ctrl-+.
Allegedly, if I had Media Center on my computer, this could be worked around. But with Netflix + Silverlight, it cannot be accomplished. Of course, this situation works fine if I'm playing a DVD on my own computer -- it just doesn't work with Netflix's streaming service.
It is therefore retarded (in a very literal sense of the word).
I'd like also to note that Flash seems to have the same difficulty, and that its behavior is similarly inexcusable and retarded.
The best I can do, if I want to watch a film in my office and occasionally fuck around on the Web, is fire up my 4-year-old laptop and use that to browse with instead of my badass dualhead desktop rig. Which, also (and obviously) is retarded.
I've complained to Microsoft Silverlight developers directly about this, and the best they ever say is something like "You're right. It is retarded. Maybe we'll fix it some day. *harumph*" while months/years pass by and it's still an issue.
Kid-proof tablet..