Hi there, I'm happy to announce Pyflix, a small Python package that provides an easy entry point for those wishing to get up and running at the Netflix Prize competition (http://www.netflixprize.com/). For those who are not aware of it, the Netflix Prize challenge is to write a recommendation algorithm that improves the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based based on their past ratings. Netflix offers $1,000,000 (one million dollars) to the first team that provides an algorithm that outperforms Cinematch (TM), the movie recommendation system developed by Netflix, by 10% or more; there's also a $50,000 Progress Prize awarded to the team with the most improvement over the previous year's accuracy.
Pyflix requires Python 2.4 or later and Numpy 1.0. It combines an efficient storage scheme with a high-level API that allows contestants to focus on the real problem, the recommendation system algorithm. You may download Pyflix and find more about it at http://pyflix.python-hosting.com. Enjoy and good luck! George -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
