I like programming and I am especially good at working on large sets of data. I’ve always had a job where I have to work on fuzzy information and distill it down to a few essential nuggets. One of my first programming jobs was for the old Western Union (the original one that sent telegraphs, not the current “send money to Nigeria” one). I was on the SWAT team for making special reports. I had to learn a half dozen odd computer languages in order to extract weird information from their huge databases. I used tools like Snobol, Maxis and Ramis, which are long forgotten, to sort through data and summarize it.
The Netflix Prize is an award of $1,000,000 to the person who can improve on their algorithm to predict which movies a person will like based on their previous purchases.
I have some ideas that might or might not work. I’m going to give it a try.
A bad thing is that I have been given 5 new projects in the last week and each one is due yesterday. Screw that, I am badly in need of nice crunchy programming problem.