Pretty exciting. I've been working on the prize in my spare time. Got to #162 (.8838 rmse).

The algorithms involved and the solutions from past years have been very interesting. I highly recommend that people check out the forum posts on http://netflixprize.com

The winning submission was made by a combination of the top 3 teams. In my opinion, if they win it, it's well deserved! It will be very interesting to see Pragmatic Theory's method published.

Teams BellKor and Chaos Theory published their methods when they won the 2008 Progress Prize.