I listened to last week's edition of On the Media and heard they did a piece on the Netflix Prize. The Netflix Prize is a $1 million prize being offered to a team who can improve the engine that drives the Netflix movie recommendations by 10%.
For the unititated, when you rent from Netflix, you can rate the movies you rent. Netflix then recommends movies you might like based on your answers. That's how they keep you coming back. You can imagine it is pretty important to have a good recommendation system.
There are several teams getting close to the magical 10%, but progress is very slow. It turns out that one movie accounts for 15% of all the missed recommendations: Napoleon Dynamite. That just blew me away: Out of the tens of thousands of movies, one accounts for 15% of the misses! Most of the rest of the errors are caused by a few similar quirky indie flicks.
If you can figure out how to predict if your friends will like Napoleon Dynamite and write some comptuer code, you could be on your way to $1 million!
Racine veterans group hosts toy giveaway
40 minutes ago
Posts
4 comments:
I still haven't figured out whether or not I like that movie.
I hadn't heard of the Netflix Challenge - very cool!
Happy Thanksgiving to the JT Irregular gang!
I haven't seen Napoleon Dynamite and not a member of Netflix...almost curious to see if it would be recommedned for me and if I would like it!
I hate to admit... I LOVED that stupid movie. Something about it. (what does that say about my maturity or mentality?)
Rented it and laughed my tush off. Got up the next day and son and I were just going to watch the extras. Wound up watching the whole thing again. I've seen bits and pieces of it since then too. Gosh, Idiot!
I wish I knew how to write the code. I could use that million...
Post a Comment