Clive Thompson wrote an incredibly interesting article for The New York Times Magazine about a big problem Netflix is having in perfecting Cinematch, their recommendation engine. You see, Cinematch is the brains behind Netflix staying consumer base. It recommends a movie that it thinks you might like based on previous reviews you’ve made on the site and on movies you’ve watched. The problem is that Cinematch is nowhere near perfect. Sometimes, it lists movies that are unrelated to other titles you’ve seen and this in effect could mean business for Netflix if it can’t convince members to continue renting.
The problem is so difficult to solve that Netflix has enlisted the help of the public to improve Cinematch up to 10% with a grand prize of $1 million if any person or group reaches this goal. So far, no person or group has.
At the moment, the top team is somewhere at about 9.44%, so close to the 10% prize but also so far. It seems that progress is slowing down because of cult films like Napoleon Dynamite that often generate 1 or 5-star reviews — people either love it or hate it, and there is often very little sentiments in between.
Bertoni, one of the contestants striving for the $1 million prize says this about the competition:
But his progress had slowed to a crawl. The more Bertoni improved upon Netflix, the harder it became to move his number forward. This wasn’t just his problem, though; the other competitors say that their progress is stalling, too, as they edge toward 10 percent. Why?
Bertoni says it’s partly because of “Napoleon Dynamite,” an indie comedy from 2004 that achieved cult status and went on to become extremely popular on Netflix. It is, Bertoni and others have discovered, maddeningly hard to determine how much people will like it. When Bertoni runs his algorithms on regular hits like “Lethal Weapon” or “Miss Congeniality” and tries to predict how any given Netflix user will rate them, he’s usually within eight-tenths of a star. But with films like “Napoleon Dynamite,” he’s off by an average of 1.2 stars.
The reason, Bertoni says, is that “Napoleon Dynamite” is very weird and very polarizing. It contains a lot of arch, ironic humor, including a famously kooky dance performed by the titular teenage character to help his hapless friend win a student-council election. It’s the type of quirky entertainment that tends to be either loved or despised. The movie has been rated more than two million times in the Netflix database, and the ratings are disproportionately one or five stars.
Of course, Napoleon Dynamite isn’t the only film causing the problems as there are a bunch of other films that polarize the population just like it does. The exciting thing about this research competition is that whatever comes of it, it’ll be neat that computers will be able to make predictions a bit closer to human ones, thus possibly allowing for better robotic humanoids in the future! Right?
