Features

NYTimes, 6/27/09, by Steve Lohr. After nearly three years and entries from more than 50,000 contestants, a multinational team says that it has met the requirements to win the million-dollar Netflix Prize: It developed powerful algorithms that improve the movie recommendations made by Netflix's existing software by more than 10 percent.

On Friday, a coalition of four teams calling itself BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos - made up of statisticians, machine learning experts and computer engineers from America, Austria, Canada and Israel - declared that it had produced a program that improves the accuracy of the predictions by 10.05 percent.

Under the rules of the contest, Netflix said that other contestants now have 30 days to try to do even better. If they cannot, BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos will collect the $1 million.

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