wazootybob
October 2nd, 2006, 06:06 PM
Netflix Announces $1 Million Prize
Sunday that it would award $1 million -- The Netflix Prize -- to the software developer who could improve the accuracy of its movie recommendation system by 10 percent. In a statement announcing the prize, Netflix Chairman and CEO Reed Hastings said that such systems would play “an increasingly significant commercial role in the future” as the company takes on new rivals. Separately, Hastings told the New York Times: “The beauty of the Netflix prize is you can be a mathematician in Romania or a statistician in Taiwan, and you could be the winner." Currently the Netflix system looks at movies that customers have purchased in the past to predict movies that they are likely to enjoy in the future.
Sunday that it would award $1 million -- The Netflix Prize -- to the software developer who could improve the accuracy of its movie recommendation system by 10 percent. In a statement announcing the prize, Netflix Chairman and CEO Reed Hastings said that such systems would play “an increasingly significant commercial role in the future” as the company takes on new rivals. Separately, Hastings told the New York Times: “The beauty of the Netflix prize is you can be a mathematician in Romania or a statistician in Taiwan, and you could be the winner." Currently the Netflix system looks at movies that customers have purchased in the past to predict movies that they are likely to enjoy in the future.