What was the Netflix Prize, and why did a million-dollar contest change the recommendation engine industry?
Netflix bet $1 million that outsiders could beat their own engineers at predicting what you want to watch.
The answer
In October 2006, Netflix released a dataset of 100 million movie ratings and challenged anyone to improve their Cinematch recommendation algorithm by 10%. The competition attracted over 40,000 teams from 186 countries and ran for nearly three years. In September 2009, team 'BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos' won the $1,000,000 grand prize by achieving a 10.06% improvement, using a blend of over 100 different algorithmic approaches. The contest popularized collaborative filtering and matrix factorization techniques that now power recommendation systems across the entire tech industry.
Source: Netflix Tech Blog
- recommendation systems
- competition
- collaborative filtering
More from AI & Machine Learning
- What radical question did Alan Turing ask in 1950 that launched the entire field of artificial intelligence?
- Can a machine fool you into thinking it's human - and does that mean it's truly intelligent?
- What happened at a small Dartmouth workshop in 1956 that gave artificial intelligence its name?
- How did a 1958 invention called the Perceptron convince people that machines could learn like brains?
- Could a 1966 chatbot really make people believe they were talking to a therapist?
- What was the first robot that could 'reason' about its own actions?