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.

I am still waiting...

[jeffmeden]

What they need to start is a contest to improve their incredibly lousy on-demand service, the Silverlight player is beyond terrible. All this effort (and money) over getting 10% more accurate guesses that the same guy who liked "Terminator" will like "Terminator 2" is nice and all, but it's a bit of a time waster don't you think?

Re:these guys are all improving each other's code

[AlXtreme]

so how do you ascertain who won? Netflix won

There, fixed that for you.

Re:these guys are all improving each other's code

[johnsonav]

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.

Re:these guys are all improving each other's code

[Spy Hunter]

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.

Re:these guys are all improving each other's code

[swillden]

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.

Re:What contest?

[romcabrera]

They have invented this nifty thing called "the Google", you know?