
Netflix Prize Rules for Improvements to Cinematch (Ended in 2009) - mhb
https://www.netflixprize.com/rules.html
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superqd
I competed in this, and found it somewhat fun. It was like an x-prize for
computer science. I knew little about this area of research or work. So when I
first saw the data, which was simply movie IDs and user IDs with dates and
ratings, and NO other information, I didn't possibly see how any predicting
could be done. I spent each morning commute thinking it over, surprised there
was no movie metadata released, or user demographics. Just meaningless IDs,
and rating dates and ratings on those dates (by a given user).

What was great, was that as I thought I about it, the more I started thinking
ok, well, if that is all you have, what can you do with it. And essentially
started realizing you can look for other users to compare a user to, and find
similarities between movies based on ratings, or similar users and their
ratings for a movie, etc.

At some point, after writing my own code, I did some research and learned of
cohort analysis, etc, and found I'd invented the same stuff as others (I'd
invented my own correlation algorithms, etc). For some reason, I found all of
that super fun. In the end, I did beat their algorithm, but not by enough to
win.

