Netflix Prize

The Netflix Prize was a competition that Netflix launched in 2006. Their goal was to make their movie recommendation system better. They offered a $1 million prize to whoever could create a computer program that could accurately predict what movies people wanted to watch. To do this, they gave competitors access to a database of anonymous ratings that Netflix customers had given to different movies. Competitors created algorithms to look at the data and predict what movies people would like. In 2009, a team of scientists known as BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos won the prize by creating a program that made more accurate predictions than Netflix's old system.