יום חמישי, 3 באפריל 2014

Three comments on the Netflix story (by Alexis C. Madrigal in the Atlantic)

אורן פרז (פורסם לראשונה בבלוגו 'Regulatory Paradoxes')

1) The introspective power of the algorithm: “It’s not just that Netflix can show you things you might like, but that it can tell you what kinds of things those are. It is, in its own weird way, a tool for introspection”. I’m not sure to what extent this introspective capacity is manifested in reality but this is interesting.

2) Bugs and ghosts in the machine - it seems that the combination of machine learning and human intelligence (through the human tagging process) produced inexplicable anomalies (e.g., the popularity of Perry Mason’s stars in netflix altgenres). Todd Yellin, Netflix’s VP of Product had the following to say about that:
"Let me get philosophical for a minute. In a human world, life is made interesting by serendipity,"… "The more complexity you add to a machine world, you’re adding serendipity that you couldn’t imagine. Perry Mason is going to happen. These ghosts in the machine are always going to be a by-product of the complexity. And sometimes we call it a bug and sometimes we call it a feature".

3) Can netflix be duplicated? One example is Pandora’s Music Genome Project. But can it be applied to politics - imagine an algorithm that studies our political preferences and recommends how we should vote on the next elections?

See, Alexis C. Madrigal, How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood


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