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Comment by Ecio78 | Hacker News Reader

And Netflix was willing to pay $1m to someone who could beat their own algorithm by 10%

Yet at the end they decided not to implement it http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/04/16/what-the-...

Ugh I hate it when people make this claim or link this article. If you follow one more article link deep, they say implemented some of the earlier code that came out of it, code that provided the real business value consistently.

Do you know what caused a team to win?

They Realized (1) people rate movies higher on specific days ( why would you want to implement that into your estimator? And (2) they realized that all the movies that Netflix was asking about we're movies the user was willing to rate, and because users tended to rate movies they like, this biased the results, so basically, they didn't implement the hacking the test

They may not have implemented it, but they now know a) what's possible, b) one possible way to achieve the goal and c) how much effort is involved. I think the article misses the point as research often yields an answer that isn't a winning business proposition (at least at the moment). I'd love to know whether there were any actions taken based on the contest.

True, but other articles have said the main reason is that their business changed. The contest was based on DVD rentals, now they emphasize streaming, and that changes viewing patterns...people skip around, sample several movies before settling on one, watch their favorite parts, etc.

And that they took some of the learnings during the contest and saw some decent gains.

For those interested in why and how, there's also http://blog.echen.me/2011/10/24/winning-the-netflix-prize-a-...

They didn't implement it in the end? Doofuses (or doofii).

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