The Napoleon Dynamite Problem

I was not planning on blogging at the end of week ten but this article in the New York Times caught my eye. It discusses the Netflix challenge to create an algorithm to improve their recommendation algorithm. The part that I found particularly interesting is that certain movies are really hard to classify. Bertoni, the computer programmer in the article, says that his algorithm is really accurate for the fast majority of movies but there are a few movies that are really hard to predict. Napoleon Dynamite for example. It is one of those movies that people either love or hate and it is hard to say why. He says that other polarizing movies such as Lost in Translation, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Kill Bill are also hard to predict. The difficulty of predicting specific movies and relative ease of predicting others adds an interesting dynamic to the network of movie preferences.