Netflix, recommendation engines, and the problem of Napoleon Dynamite
Kottke has some thoughts about the problem computer programmers have coming up with an algorithm that might recommend, or not recommend, the movie Napoleon Dynamite:
The thing that all those kinds of movies have in common is that if you’re outside of the intended audience for a particular movie, you probably won’t get it. That means that if you hear about a movie that’s highly recommended within a certain group and you’re not in that group, you’re likely to hate it. In some ways, these are movies intended for a narrow audience, were highly regarded within that audience, tried to cross over into wider appeal, and really didn’t make it.
This problem has dimensionality. There is no way to come up with a simple 1 to 5 rating system that works for everyone. Neither voting by the users nor any analysis of popularity with the majority be able to solve this problem. Instead, a separate category should exist for the highly contentious movies such as this. I suspect that, just as Pandora has done for music, there should be a way to deduce what a movie viewer likes, if you already know all of the movies that the viewer likes. But without a full inventory of every movie that the viewer likes and dislikes, there will be no way to guess at whether they will like movies as odd as Napoleon Dynamite.
(I personally love Napoleon Dynamite.)