netflap.com Blog

So I was reading in the news today about this NetFlix competition where they are offering a million dollars for the first person/team to improve the accuracy of their movie suggestion algorithm by 10%.

Now, NetFlix is a pretty big company and I’m sure they have some pretty smart people working for them.  The question for people entering this contest is, just how smart are the Netflix engineers?

From a business point of view, this move by NetFlix is extremely smart.  It will make thousands of people try to solve an extremely difficult problem.  Since the problem has been worked on for years now and little progress has been made recently, it is more than likely that the next major advancement will come by moving away from the current top solution and using a completely different technique.  This contest should fuel new thought and innovation and I believe NetFlix should be commended for funding research in this way.

Now the question is… should I try?  A seemingly impossible task with a million dollar reward… that’s right up my alley.

I’ll have to look into it a little more…

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