BellKor Wins Netflix $1 Million By 20 Minutes

eldavojohn writes "As we discussed at the time, there was a strange development at the end of Netflix's competition in which The Ensemble passed BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos by 0.01% a mere twenty minutes after BellKor had submitted results past the ten percent mark required to win the million dollars. Unfortunately for The Ensemble, BellKor was declared the victor this morning because of that twenty-minute margin. For those of you following the story, The New York Times reports on how teams merged to form Bellkor's Pragmatic Chaos and take the lead, which sparked an arms race of teams conjoining to merge their algorithms to produce better results. Now the Netflix Prize 2 competition has been announced." The Times blog quotes Greg McAlpin, a software consultant and a leader of the Ensemble: "Having these big collaborations may be great for innovation, but it's very, very difficult. Out of thousands, you have only two that succeeded. The big lesson for me was that most of those collaborations don't work."

Comments

nonsense

[wizardforce]

The big lesson for me was that most of those collaborations don't work."

Setting an arbitrary goal that only .2% of competitors could meet does not mean that most collaborations don't work. If 90% of the teams met the target, you probably wouldn't be so quick to claim that the vast majority of collaborations do work but rather that the goal wasn't high enough.

Funny, I learned a different lesson...

[Squiggle]

The big lesson for me was that big collaborations were the most successful.

In creating solutions for hard problems most of everything fails and is horribly difficult. No big surprise there. Kinda odd that was the quoted lesson...