When the Netflix Prize was awarded last month, it ended three years of intense competition aimed at finding a better algorithm for predicting users' movie preferences. The winning team, BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, was the first to forecast Netflix customers' movie ratings with 10 percent better accuracy than the company's in-house system--a feat that many experts believed would be impossible when the million-dollar prize was announced. Netflix plans to offer a second prize. (source: technologyreview.com)
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