Communications of the ACM
How the Netflix Prize Was Won
The secret to the success of BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos and The Ensemble, first- and second-place winners of the Netflix Prize, was teamwork.
The Netflix Prize offered $1 million to the team that could improve its movie recommendation algorithm by 10 percent.
Both of the winning teams combined the strengths of several smaller teams that had worked independently before being absorbed by a larger group. "In combination, these teams could get better and better and better," says Netflix's Neil Hunt. BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos and The Ensemble independently combined their members' algorithms to design more complex ones that represented everyone's input.
Rather than appointing a few team leaders that did most of the designing, the teams say they worked communally and thus increased their strength--even if some of the ideas seemed unrelated to the initial problem. One of the algorithms BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos used tracked the number of movies a Netflix viewer rated in one day.
From Wired News
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