By A Nose: Netflix Prize Leaders One-Upped With One Day Remaining

26
Jul

By A Nose: Netflix Prize Leaders One-Upped With One Day Remaining

author: editor category: TechCrunch

Last month news broke that a team of computer scientists had finally managed to improve Netflix’s recommendation algorithm by 10%, making them eligible to win the $1 million Netflix Prize, a competition that began back in 2006. The team, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, is composed of two former leaders in the competition who banded together in attempt to finally break the the 10% barrier and managed to succeed with a score of 10.08%. However, their announcement kicked off a 30 day window where other teams were invited to make their final submissions and potentially take the prize. Tonight, with just one day remaining, a team called The Ensemble has managed to overtake BellKor with a score of 10.09% — an improvement of .01% over the former leaders. You can see the full leaderboard here.

According to its homepage, the Ensemble is made up of three teams who chose to join forces: “Grand Prize Team”, “Opera Solutions”, and “Vandelay United”. The Ensemble has just posted the following blog post to its official site:

We are happy today to have made a submission which surpasses Netflix’s 10% Grand Prize target. The Ensemble is the second team to do this in less than a month. We are very proud of our achievements, and those of our top competitor, Bellkor’s Pragmatic Chaos.

The competition will end tomorrow morning, so teams still have a little bit of time left to make their last-second submissions, but things are looking good for The Ensemble. This has to be absolutely brutal for team BellKor.

Thanks to TechCrunch intern Dan Romero for the tip.

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