Netflix $1 Million Prize: And the Winner is…

Jul 2nd 2009 at 12:18pm

Well, if we told you, we’d be super-psychic geniuses. Netflix still hasn’t announced the winner of its three-year long contest. But we have a hunch as to who it will be. Can you guess?

The Netflix Prize calls all brilliant minds to create a better algorithm for improving the accuracy of movie predictions based on customer preferences for the world’s largest online movie rental service.

Just a few days ago, a coalition of four teams calling itself BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos — made up of statisticians, machine learning experts and computer engineers from the U.S., Austria, Canada and Israel — declared that it had produced a program that improves the accuracy of the predictions by 10.05 percent.

Under the rules of the contest, Netflix said that other contestants now have 30 days to try to do even better. If they cannot, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos will collect the $1 million.

We can’t lie. We’re proudly rooting for BellKor’s Israeli research member, Yehuda Koren, who also happens to be Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research Israel.

Read the full New York Times story here, and stay tuned to find out who wins the big bucks!

Photo Credit: dolphinsdock on Flickr used under Creative Commons License