steve baker: Got this email from the second-place team in the competition, which got exactly the same results, but minutes later: Hi Mr. Baker. In your article "Netflix Prize: Another Million at Stake" you included a quote from Newman ! from the Netflix Prize forums. Newman ! is Bo Yang, a major contributor of The Ensemble. The Ensemble achieved exactly the same level of accuracy as BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, but our final entry was submitted about ten minutes later than the best submission from BPC. Since the score on the hidden test set was the same for the two teams, the tie breaker was the time at which the predictions were submitted. Bo Yang made a major contribution to the field of machine learning with his performance breakthrough for using K-Nearest Neighbors models (see http://www.the-ensemble.com/content/our-models under "Performance"). He discovered a way to reduce the time needed to compare the relationships between hundreds of millions of objects from several hours to 2 minutes. Thanks for covering the competition! Greg McAlpin member of The Ensemble  Sep. 25, 2009, 5:24pm Laurent Pacalin: I congratulate Stephen Baker for having foreseen this trend and agree that predictive analytics play an increasingly significant role in the real world whether for consumer entertainment or consumer credit. At FICO (formerly Fair Isaac), we believe that math-fueled good decisions will bend the future arc compellingly toward the useful and the positive. We see this trend happening externally, in society at large, and internally, within the profession. We anticipate that the finest quants using the most advanced mathematics will rededicate themselves to the highest calling of developing decision management models that speed the velocity of global commerce and raise everyone’s level of success. We also believe that these enhanced tools will power better decisions by those entrusted to make those decisions. The two disciplines – good decisions supported by good models – go hand in hand. Working together, they can reclaim their proper shared role in society: rational, scientific, and broadly beneficial. Laurent Pacalin Chief Marketing Officer at FICO  Sep. 22, 2009, 5:08pm