Psychologist Beating Math Nerds in Race to Netflix Prize 205
s1d writes "An almost-anonymous British psychologist named Gavin Potter has suddenly risen to the top of the Netflix prize charts. With his very first attempt, he got a score which took the BellKor team seven months to reach. Currently at a score of 8.07, he has only five teams ahead of him now in the race for the ultimate Netflix algorithm. 'Potter says his anonymity is mostly accidental. He started that way and didn't come out into the open until after Wired found him. "I guess I didn't think it was worth putting up a link until I had got somewhere," he says, adding that he'd been seriously posting under the name of his venture capital and consulting firm, Mathematical Capital, for two months before launching "Just a guy." When he started competing, he posted to his blog: "Decided to take the Netflix Prize seriously. Looks kind of fun. Not sure where I will get to as I am not an academic or a mathematician. However, being an unemployed psychologist I do have a bit of time."'"
Average psychologist (Score:5, Informative)
that had an undergraduate degree in psychology, a masters degree in operations research [wikipedia.org] that after being well employed for a number of years -- "In 2006, he left his job at IBM to explore the idea of starting a PhD in machine learning, a field in which he has no formal training. When he read about the Netflix Prize, he decided to give it a shot -- what better way to find out just how serious about the topic he really was?"
Misleading summary (Score:5, Informative)
Umm.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:how many GB is the dataset? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:how many GB is the dataset? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:how many GB is the dataset? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Free Idea (Score:3, Informative)
Contest participants retain ownership of the code they write, but the winning team must license it (non-exclusively) to Netflix.