a little something for the coders

Ran across this on CNN this morning, figured those with the skillz might find it interesting.

Basic jist, Netflix is still offering a million dollars to anyone that can enhance their movie recomendation software by 10 percent.

Details here if anyone is interested:

www.cnn.com...

Spiderj

[edit on 11/14/2007 by Spiderj]

I would think all you need is 3 criteria; the genre, director and actor/actress.

Most people choose movies based on those.

Have customers volunteer the information, pop it into the database and walla.

That should get you at least a 10% increase.

Am I understanding this correctly?

actually it's a bit trickier.

It's not the search database but the recomendation software that chooses movies for you based on past rentals/purchases.

If you rent a lot of sci-fi netflix will "recomend" other movies of that genre.

What I believe they're trying to do is make that more accurate.

If you say rent "The Warriors", "Gangs of New York" and "Lords of Flatbush" you may get recomendations of other gang movies, but with more enhanced software you might find instead of getting recomendations on other "gang" films you might get things like "New York" based films or "Period films" or even documentaries about the history of gangs etc. etc.

It's pretty beyond me but someone who understands this stuff could win a lot of cash from Netflix.

spider

Right.

But I think it has alot to do with the data in the database too.

Look at this website. To make searches more accurate we are asked to include "tags" which narrows the search criteria.

A naturalized database would include such "tags" linked to customers.