Netflix knows what you want to watch next. And it’s starting in 4, 3, 2, 1 seconds…. They these recommendations automatically using a recommendation algorithm. This algorithm instructs Netflix’s servers to process information from its databases to determine which movies a customer is likely to enjoy. <read on>
It took them three years, but a team led by AT&T Research engineers won the $1 million Netflix Prize for devising the best way to improve the company’s movie recommendation algorithm, which generates an average of 30 billion predictions per day, by 10 percent or more.
Amazingly, the decision came down to a matter of minutes, according to Netflix Prize chief Neil Hunt. BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos submitted their solution 10 minutes earlier than the second-place team, The Ensemble, while the two teams’ algorithms were a perfect tie, score-wise.