Back in 2006, Netflix launched a contest to improve its movie recommendation algorithm. To win the Netflix Prize, a team has to improve the accuracy of the Netflix movie recommendations by 10% or more. The prize is a million dollars. Now it looks like one team may have won the contest, with a score of 10.05%. Although several teams had come close, nobody was able to hit the 10% mark until members of four top teams joined forces. It's not over yet, though. Other teams now have 30 days to best the 10,05% result, with the prize going to the best overall score.

BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, the first team to top 10%, includes researchers from Yahoo and AT&T, and many of the team members have collected Netflix's Yearly Progress Prize for their attempts in previous years. The rules of the contest require that the winning team explain how their algorithm works, and allow Netflix to use their work. This victory may have come sooner than Netflix expected: the contest was scheduled to run until 2011 if no one could come up with a suitable solution before then.