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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."
I agree that Ensemble "losing" because they posted 20 minutes later is a harsh result. However, those were the rules that Netflix set forth and Ensemble, intentionally or not, was making a risky gamble by waiting until right before the deadline to submit their project. And, perhaps the "tie goes to the earlier poster" rule makes some sense because it encourages making your submission earlier that you would otherwise and not "sniping" unless you're absolutely sure your project is better than the rest. At least as far as I can understand, the rule set forth the proper tradeoff -- Ensemble got to see the score to beat (BellKor's) before it posted; however, in exchange for that, its score needed to have been better in order to win. Had Ensemble wanted the first-mover's advantage and the win in event of a tie, it could have posted earlier than BellKor. The fact that BellKor posted only 20 minutes before the end of the competition suggests that Ensemble could have easily posted earlier without compromising its entry. That is, how much significant tinkering could have possibly been done in the last half hour of this multi-year competition?
I was just about to post the very same comment. By the contest rules, the contest ends the once someone comes up with a winning solution. The fact that there were 2 solutions meeting the requirement so close together and both resulting from collaborations would rather suggest the collaborations worked really well. The other collaborations simply stopped once there was a winner. Concluding from this that collaborations don't work would be like concluding that the training athletes go through prior to the Olympic games doesn't work - after all from all these entrants training hard only 1 wins in each event.
This doesn't work. If you make the entry cost nonzero, you'll be much less efficient at doing *science*. Remember, the journey is much more important than the result. The benefits to society in disseminating knowledge of data mining technologies and good datasets largely dwarfs the knowledge of the winning entry (think Metcalfe's law).