Montreal Tech Watch

In the same vein as the various X-Prizes setup by private and public organizations, the Netflix prize spurred lots of interest in mathematicians and hackers circle.

The competition invited programmers and scientists all over the world to find a better recommendation engine. It would allow Netflix to predict better if a user would like a movie, based on his previous ratings, and other users’. The winning mark was a 10% improvement.

Now it looks like the Pragmatic Theory snatched the prize, with 10.05% improvement. Pragmatic Theory is made of Electrical engineer Martin Piotte and software engineer Martin Chabbert of Montreal, working in the telecommunications industry, and apparently algorithm crafters in their spare time. Their work came up at the 1st place since March this year, and they’ve reached the final mark by adding work made by Comendo, Yahoo! Reasearch and AT&T.

The Netflix prize came with a $1million prize. Initially, it wasn’t open to residents of Québec, but on 24th of March 2009, when Pragmatic Theory got the lead, Netflix changed the rules to accept as well residents of Québec. That’s good for Netflix, a wise decision (compared to the Régie des Jeux du Québec’s rulings…), and fortunate for all of Quebec residents, since it would have been the laughing subject of tech publications otherwise.

The rules of the competition also stated that the winning team could also commercialize the product of their work, on top of the cash prize. Congrats to the Pragmatic Team, congrats for their perseverance and sheer brilliance, since they present it as only a “leisure project”.