...and I eat crow: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=393667

Haskell wins: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=394528

Pretty exciting. I've been working on the prize in my spare time. Got to #162 (.8838 rmse).

The algorithms involved and the solutions from past years have been very interesting. I highly recommend that people check out the forum posts on http://netflixprize.com

The winning submission was made by a combination of the top 3 teams. In my opinion, if they win it, it's well deserved! It will be very interesting to see Pragmatic Theory's method published.

Teams BellKor and Chaos Theory published their methods when they won the 2008 Progress Prize.

I thought one of the caveat of the prize was that the winner was not supposed to disclose the algorithm they used, isn't?

On the contrary, they are supposed to publish it.

would you have the URL for the methods?

Wow! I wonder though how they account for over fitting of the data. Is it a real solution or a statistical anomaly? I ask because it seems that the progress over the last year(s) has been small increments within the 9-10% range.

I'm also worried about this. I believe that Netflix has a separate data set, not used in the previous reports of mean squared error, which validates the $ prize. I also believe that the teams have been use the Netflix-reported squared errors from standard test data to combine their estimates. If so, in a month we're going to learn that the Prize has not actually been won yet.

But I wonder whether the effect of an unknown dataset slowly seeps into the algorithms as they are tweaked, especially when 100s of algorithms are competing to fit that data.

It might be akin to the fact that if you correlate more than 25-30 sets of 25-30 random numbers, you would find at least one statistifcally significant correlation.

They are not granted access to the data set, so it would be statistically unlikely to achieve 10% RMSE improvement on the test set solely by chance.

And so it begins. It will be interesting to see what other teams will do now with such a tight deadline.

I dare say, if you can do what they are doing ~ your not to worried about perfect html or design.