Netflix Prize

In October 2006, Netflix announced a grand prize of one million dollars for a better movie-recommending algorithm that is at least 10 percent better than its own. Within two weeks, the DVD rental company had received 169 submissions, including three that were slightly superior to Cinematch, Netflix's recommendation software. After a month, more than a thousand programs had been entered, and the top scorers were almost halfway to the goal. But what started out looking simple suddenly got hard. The contest is expected to continue until 2011.

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