Lots Of Interest In The Netflix Prize Competition

circletimessquare writes: "It's old news, from October 2006: Netflix has offered $1 million to the person or group who can make a 10% improvement to their Cinematch movie recommendation algorithm. But the competition is still going strong, with a vibrant, competitive roster of some 30,000 programmers around the globe hard at work trying to win the prize. The New York Times profiles some of the more obsessive searchers such as Len Bertoni, a semi-retired computer scientist near Pittsburgh who logs 20 hours a week on the problem, oftentimes with the help of his children. And Martin Chabbert in Montreal: 'After the kids are asleep and I've packed the lunches for school, I come down at 9 in the evening and work until 11 or 12.' The article gets into the history of the search algorithm Netflix currently uses, and explores the hot commodity called 'singular value decomposition' that serves as the basis for most of the algorithms in competition."