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Netflix Prize Competitor Already Beats Netflix

Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon Oct 09, 2006 10:14 AM
from the no-really-drop-dead-gorgeous-is-funny dept.
The Almighty Buck
Baldrson writes "Within the first week of the announcement of The Netflix Prize a team has already beaten Netflix's own movie recommendation algorithm. This is pretty impressive given the previously quoted researcher who said: 'You're competing with 15 years of really smart people banging away at the problem.' The team is WXYZConsulting.com apparently registered by a data mining professor named Yi Zhang. Congratulations are in order for Netflix and Prof. Zhang's team who are demonstrating, yet again, the power of prizes to accelerate progress."
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[+] News: Build a Better Netflix, Win a Million Dollars? 197 comments
An anonymous reader writes "In a quest to better movie recommendations, Netflix is opening their database (nytimes, registration and first child required) to users to try to craft a better recommendation technology. The problem is not easy. Says one researcher: 'You're competing with 15 years of really smart people banging away at the problem.'" Recommender systems are really an interesting problem, and that is likely very interesting data to play with.
[+] Developers: Psychologist Beating Math Nerds in Race to Netflix Prize 205 comments
s1d writes "An almost-anonymous British psychologist named Gavin Potter has suddenly risen to the top of the Netflix prize charts. With his very first attempt, he got a score which took the BellKor team seven months to reach. Currently at a score of 8.07, he has only five teams ahead of him now in the race for the ultimate Netflix algorithm. 'Potter says his anonymity is mostly accidental. He started that way and didn't come out into the open until after Wired found him. "I guess I didn't think it was worth putting up a link until I had got somewhere," he says, adding that he'd been seriously posting under the name of his venture capital and consulting firm, Mathematical Capital, for two months before launching "Just a guy." When he started competing, he posted to his blog: "Decided to take the Netflix Prize seriously. Looks kind of fun. Not sure where I will get to as I am not an academic or a mathematician. However, being an unemployed psychologist I do have a bit of time."'"
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  • Upon further consideration... (Score:4, Funny)

    by scoser (780371) on Monday October 09 2006, @10:18AM (#16364525) Journal

    the power of prizes to accelerate progress

    Hmm...In that case, I'm offering $1000 USD to the person or group that can find me the perfect girlfriend!

  • Assuming this isn't a hoax... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by UbuntuDupe (970646) on Monday October 09 2006, @10:23AM (#16364605) Journal
    I think this demonstrates how important "many eyeballs" are in problem solving. Intelligent people "who have been attacking the problem for 15 years" can still fail to see an "obvious" solution. I shudder at how many scientific fields probably have obvious solutions that aren't being found because only a small cadre of people have been exposed to the problem. I also shudder at people who artificially set up barriers to understanding their own fields, in order to protect their own egos. The attitude of "journal articles need to be cryptic or they must not be important" needs to go.
    • Sometimes one person with a different perspective on a problem can see something that a groups of "experts" had never thought of, or had discounted because they assumed it wouldn't work.

      That's why a fresh perspective on a problem can be quite enlightening, and why I tend to go ask other programmers for their ideas/comments when I get stuck. I don't know everything, and I sometimes make stupid assumptions or forget to consider certain technquies. No group is immune from this.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by porkThreeWays (895269)
      I did work for the USDA horticulture lab around here awhile back. I didn't think security of the data was a huge deal, just as long as no one outside could get to it.

      Boy was I wrong. Within the same building, it was a big deal to show other scientists your teams research. They wanted security to make sure other teams couldn't see any of their work. And from what I was told, that's the norm in the scientific community. It's all about keeping your teams funding.

      I always grew up thinking the scientific c

    • Hmm, it also demonstrates... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by gosand (234100) on Monday October 09 2006, @11:13AM (#16365277) Homepage
      I think this demonstrates how important "many eyeballs" are in problem solving.

      I think it also demonstrates how the oft-used mantra of "if it needs to be done, it will be done" doesn't always work without some incentive. One of the hurdles of OSS is that the only things that get worked on are the things that people want to work on. The love of developing software can only get you so far (and wow, has it gotten us far). But for some things to advance, it will need financial backing. It's a prickly problem for the OSS community.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Peter Cooper (660482)
        Is there any sort of bounties / bounty search site that lists most / all of the various development bounties out there? I've tried Googling but haven't come up with anything compelling so far. I think such a site would rock. You could end up with good developers just living off of bounties.
      • "I also shudder at people who artificially set up barriers to understanding their own fields, in order to protect their own egos."

        "Like who?"

        One that comes to mind are research organizations that patent huge swaths of minor discoveries in their field, so that it behooves any other inventors/researchers *not to look at their patent portfolio (and therefore learn more about the field) because they could be sued for infringement if they ever go near those topics.

  • banned in Quebec (Score:5, Funny)

    by welcher (850511) on Monday October 09 2006, @10:27AM (#16364663)
    Looking in the competition rules, I was surpised to see that:

    Residents of the province of Quebec in Canada are ineligible to participate. Residents of Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Sudan are also ineligible to participate.

    Is Quebec the next target for regime change?
  • This shows that greed can be used in a positive way.

    That is all I have to say, anyone else have anything to add?

    • The only comment I have is in response to the statement about how a prize helps "advance" something. Now, I can see how there might be some spin-off technologies from space travel that will help society in general cope with a changing world environment, but I can't for the life of me see how a system for recommending movies can really be all that much of a societal advance.

      Sure, entertainment is great, and the general economic activity that is generated by entertainment may eventually bleed down to the mor

      • Well if you look at the underlying technique (essentially filtering algorithms) then one can extend it to a variety of areas which might be more useful than movie recomendations. An example area would be analysis of biology/chemistry literature to search for molecules with properties related to diseases. Image a 'drug recomendation' system (for the scientists who're looking for drugs, not for people to decide whether to take a Tylenol!)

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Sangui5 (12317)

          then one can extend it to a variety of areas which might be more useful than movie recomendations

          I'd say, the odds are that this is going the other way. They had an existing technique, and then they extended it to movie recomendations. You don't need to offer researchers in data mining a price to get them to advance the state of the art in data mining; that's what they're interested in, and what they're payed for anyway. The prize just got them to apply it to movie recomendations.

          The only thing to se

  • Umm... Duh (Score:4, Informative)

    by Gr8Apes (679165) on Monday October 09 2006, @10:32AM (#16364741)
    Quite a few teams have beaten the Cinematch engine, but not by the required 10% for the prize. The submission is in error. They also haven't won the 1% Progress prize yet, but they're very very close.
    • Only one team on the leaderboard has beaten Cinematch. They're close to qualifying for the Progress prize, but not necessarily winning it. The Progress prize is given away yearly, and not necessarily to the team with the best score.

      Netflix was actually pretty smart about how they set up the contest. The $1 million prize is going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to attain, but for a mere $50K per year they have thousands of people making small improvements to their system.

  • to note -- (Score:5, Informative)

    by aleksiel (678251) on Monday October 09 2006, @10:33AM (#16364771)
    although yes they have "beatten netflix", they haven't won the prize yet.
    they have about a 1% improvement on the netflix algorithm, but the prize is for 10%. they are the frontrunner for the progress prize, though, being the people who are the closest to the mark after a year (i think).

    on top of that, netflix has been doing improvements on their own code in the meantime, and its been looking like around a 1% improvement, also.

  • I'll do you one better. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Rob T Firefly (844560) on Monday October 09 2006, @10:34AM (#16364787) Homepage Journal
    I have perfected the perfect movie recommendation mechanism. It's called a "friend."

    I hold a patent on the idea, and I've copyrighted the statement "hey, I saw this movie you'd like."

    • Re:I'll do you one better. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Hacksaw (3678) on Monday October 09 2006, @10:49AM (#16364977) Homepage Journal
      Actually, I find that friends have a less than 60% chance of making a recomendation that I'll like. People like vastly different things, and for different reasons.

      However, recommendations from multiple friends raises the accuracy to close to 100%.
  • The team is WXYZConsulting.com apparently registered by a data mining professor named Yi Zhang.

    Maybe they should run a contest to come up with a better business name? Something that doesn't sound like a fly-by-night operation or a variation of something already in the phone book.
    • If they were going for the phone book, wouldn't they have at least looked at the HVAC installers and pawnbrokers and named the company AAAAConsulting.com?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by wampus (1932)
      Maybe he is the YZ in WXYZ.
    • >> "Something that doesn't sound like a fly-by-night operation "

      well, all the good names like were taken.
    • I used to some work for a computer repair company called fly-by-night technologies.
      It was totally intentional. They eventually had to change it to something not quite so obvious. I forget what it was, something like StarAir Tech. I forget..
  • It would be nice to see the algorithm used, if only to see if it can be improved.

  • Recommendation Software (Score:4, Funny)

    by cultrhetor (961872) on Monday October 09 2006, @10:57AM (#16365075) Journal
    You know, I've never seen recommendation applications worth much of anything. Ringo was okay, until M$ turned it into Firefly, which died in 1999(?). It will be interesting if this turns out well, or if it turns out like TiVO, which in Patton Oswalt's words, is like "working with a retarded kid." "No, TiVo, NO! Westerns aren't cartoons! / But you like horsies! Liar!"
  • What do prizes make?

    Progress!

  • Congratulations (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mignon (34109) <satan@programmer.net> on Monday October 09 2006, @11:14AM (#16365293)
    Congratulations on your solution to the Netflix problem. You might also find the following problem(s) interesting:
  • Formal competitions regarding problems like these [wikipedia.org] may or may not exist.

    I think solving one of them (especially under computer science) would lead to significant employment opportunities.

  • This is pretty impressive given the previously quoted researcher who said: 'You're competing with 15 years of really smart people banging away at the problem.'

    Oh please. It took them years before they figured out how to handle multi-disk sets correctly. Yes, their people must be smart (designing a orders database that scales up to a rapidly growing customer base is not easy), but none of their smarts has been directed at customer-facing technology.

    The shortcomings of Netflix recommendation system really

  • So, is this why all my movie recommendations are suddenly 'The Manturian Candiadate' ?

  • Just another proof that IT depts aren't that smart (Score:5, Insightful)

    by haggie (957598) on Monday October 09 2006, @11:33AM (#16365553)
    I've been selling technology for almost two decades and one thing that I see over and over is that internal IT departments either a.) vastly overestimate their abilities b.) prevent introduction of outside techology providers for political reasons or c.) both. There are several companies where the CIO told me "oh, we're already building that in-house. it will be live next quarter" and years later they still have not successfully implemented that technology. Kudos to Netflix for acknowledging that somebody outside their company might be able to do it better. At most companies, the CIO would have never let this happen and/or the CEO wouldn't have the business sense to challenge internal assumptions.
    • At most companies, the CIO would not let it happen because of the political fall-out that woudl ensue, not because they wouldn't recognize that other people have good ideas as well.

      The fact that Netflix is allowing customer data out of their control (albiet sanitized data) is a major step that many company's would never take out of reasons not related to the technology at all.

      And most CEO's don't challenge those internal assumptions not because of a lack of business sense, but again, because of political sa

  • wxyz... (Score:3, Funny)

    by devnullkac (223246) on Monday October 09 2006, @11:33AM (#16365557) Homepage

    WXYZConsulting.com registered to a Yi Zhang, eh? Probably co-founded it with Wilfred Xylem. Sounds fishy to me...

  • The contest isn't over yet! (Score:3)

    by Deven (13090) * <deven@ties.org> on Monday October 09 2006, @11:54AM (#16365829) Homepage
    The RMSE score (lower is better) currently posted by wxyzconsulting.com (0.9430) does indeed beat the CineMatch score (0.9514), which is almost good enough to qualify for the Progress Prize 2007 (0.9419 required), but not close to winning the Grand Prize (0.8563 required), so don't assume that this story means that the contest is over!

  • It's not called Prizes. It's Patronage. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by neo (4625) on Monday October 09 2006, @12:06PM (#16366065) Homepage
    I'm tired of people not realizing that "Prizes" are really just Patronage in desguise. I'm not saying Patronage is a bad thing... far from it. But the idea that Prizes are somehow working shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone with knowledge of 15th century aristocracy.

    Pay the people who do the work, don't get people to work for pay.

    • Re:It's not called Prizes. It's Patronage. (Score:5, Informative)

      by dangermouse (2242) on Monday October 09 2006, @02:04PM (#16367969) Homepage
      An AC already pointed this out, but I'm without mod points: This is not patronage. A patron supports the worker until the work is completed. These people are supporting themselves while they do the work, and collecting payment only if and when the work is done to the payer's satisfaction.

      It's a pretty clear distinction. This is a prize.

  • the contest is over (Score:3)

    by erikdotla (609033) on Monday October 09 2006, @05:54PM (#16371597)
    Looks like they already gave away the Grand Prize to "The Thought Gang." This just appeared on the site within the last hour.

    And I just finished downloading the dataset... jesus.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Kamineko (851857)
      On the Netflix Rules page, (a single click away) it says:

      Award of Contest Prizes

      Contest Prizes:
            1. Grand Prize: $1,000,000 (USD) Cash
            2. Progress Prizes: $50,000 (USD) Cash each award

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