Features

Wired, By Eliot Van Buskirk, August 12, 2009

The Netflix Prize, a remarkable crowdsourcing experiment, refuses to die: Runner-up teams have joined forces to overtake the leader to qualify for a $1 million payday by coming up with a movie recommendation system at least 10 percent better than the company's own technology.

Teams Bellkor (AT&T Research), Big Chaos and Pragmatic Theory combined to form Bellkor's Pragmatic Chaos, the first team to qualify for the prize on June 26 with a 10.05 percent improvement over Netflix's existing algorithm. This triggered a 30-day window in which other teams were allowed to try to catch up.

As if drawn together by unseen forces, over 30 competitors - including heavy hitters Grand Prize Team, Opera Solutions and Vandelay Industries, as well as competitors lower on the totem pole - banded together to form a new team called, fittingly, The Ensemble.

As things stand now, The Ensemble is beating Bellkor's Pragmatic Chaos on Netflix's public-facing leader board with a 10.10 percent increase over Netflix's algorithm - a smidge better than Bellkor's final score of 10.09.

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