A while back Netflix started a contest to improve their movie suggestion system. According to netflixprize.com:

“The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences.”

The winning team can bag some major cash. <dr. evil voice>One Meeeeelion Dollars</dr. evil voice> to be exact, but be warned that the problems that you are tasked to solve are very complex. We’re talking major math-brainiac stuff here.

Whatever the outcome of the contest (which will run until October, 2 2011), I hope that someone writes some software that will improve the prediction engine so that it will prevent suggestions like this one I got yesterday:

Beerfest? Gee, how did you guess?