Looks like Netflix might have a winner in their million dollar improve-our-movie-recommendations-software sweepstakes. And it's not some nerd toiling away with a protractor in his nerd room (nerd!). It's a whole bunch of nerds.

BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos (My God, how can chaos be pragmatic?! How?!), a group of math and computer people from around the world (who've been making the most contest progress over the last two years), say they've improved the accuracy of the software by 10.05%. Now the other contestants have 30 days to do better, otherwise, BellKor gets the million.

But how effective do you think their recommendation system? Or any recommendation system, for that matter?

Regardless of how this all shakes out, any improvement on a system that can prevent us from accidentally watching The Stepfather (Sela Ward, how could you?) in the future is welcome.

(Pic via shannonpatrick17 on Flickr)

Contact information for this author is not available.