An Enthusiastic Thumbs Up for Netflix

Save for enjoying the occasional Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton send-up in his younger days, Peter Drucker was never much of a movie fan. Yet he certainly would have appreciated Netflix’s efforts to upgrade its film recommendation system for its customers.

Netflix announced last week that it was awarding an international team of researchers and computer whizzes a $1 million prize for improving by 10.06 percent the online movie rental company’s ability to predict what films its users will enjoy based on how they’ve rated other titles.

The winners, who bested tens of thousands of other teams from more than 180 countries, took nearly 36 months to reach the required 10 percent threshold as they labored to make technical advances in the field of taste prediction. By prompting scientists to wrestle with a huge data set of 100 million movie ratings, Netflix may well have spurred advances in large-scale modeling that will have widespread impact.