Collective Intelligence, NetFlix Prize Edition = one million dollars… for the smartest “crowd”

NetFlix Prize – Leaderboard

One million US dollars to the winner.

“The Ensemble” is now ahead of the race…

The crowd is indeed wiser than the individual.

The 10% barrier once seemed distant and insurmountable. But when the contest’s “last call” heralded the heroic achievements of Bellkor’s Pragmatic Theory, the rest of the crowd pondered, and asked why the barrier couldn’t be broken twice.

And lo, as if powered by gravity, Grand Prize Team and Vandelay Industries! began to draw in more and more members. And Vandelay went on to join forces with Opera Solutions, and then Vandelay and Opera united with Grand Prize Team, and then … and then … well, things got so complex we decided just to call ourselves The Ensemble.

Next: How The Ensemble squeaked by to win the Netflix Prize

UPDATE: The winner is a seven-person team of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel —BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos.