The Netflix prize

Everyone is talking about the offer put up by Netflix yesterday. Basically if you can improve their movie recommendations, you win a million big ones.

This is a really cool idea. Its a hard problem (otherwise everyone and their brother would already have done it), that looks like it has no solution. But just because it looks hard doesn’t mean there isn’t a solution!

To help out Netflix has supplied a data set of user recommendations. Looks like its time to fire up Eclipse, break out the python, and put on my Data Miner hat, and start reading those AI books.