Thursday, September 18, 2008

Introducing Movilens

If you, like me, enjoy watching (English) movies then you would be overwhelmed by sheer number of movies available to watch. Not only you are at a disadvantage to be born so long after movies were started to be made, your rate of watching them is dwarfed by their rate of production. Clearly, intelligent response would be to watch intelligently, watching only what you would like, and not wasting your precious little time on earth on watching pieces of crap, if you excuse me. Enter Movielens.

Movielens is a website which uses advanced mathematics, purportedly, to predict your ratings for a movie, given your past ratings to other movies. Initially you will have to rate couple of movies to let the system calibrate your preferences. Once you've rated over 20 movies, system starts generating predictions, which improve as you rate more movies, and are near to half-point (on a five-point scale) accuracy when you've rated about 200 movies. Plus, it generates nifty statistics like ratings by genre and number of movies watched by genre. It works better than IMDB ratings which are generic for all, since given my penchant for horror, 6/10 IMDB on horror is acceptable to me than 8/10 in romance. Try it.



While we are at it, let me recommend you few of my favourites, which are not commonly popular:
  • Twelve Monkeys (1995)
  • Truman Show, The (1998)
  • To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
  • Thank You for Smoking (2006)
  • Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (2003)
  • Green Mile, The (1999)
  • Spellbound (2002)
  • Some Like It Hot (1959)
  • Roman Holiday (1953)
  • Prestige, The (2006
  • Phone Booth (2002)
  • Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
  • Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979)
  • Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
  • Monsters, Inc. (2001)
  • It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963)
  • It Happened One Night (1934)
  • Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)
  • Groundhog Day (1993)
  • Great Race, The (1965)
  • Gods Must Be Crazy, The (1980)
  • Gods Must Be Crazy II, The (1989)
  • Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
  • Diary of Anne Frank, The (1959)
  • Dial M for Murder (1954)
  • Descent, The (2005)
  • Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
  • Blair Witch Project, The (1999)
  • Thing, The (1982)
  • Speed (1994)
  • Man from Earth, The (2007)
  • Hotel Rwanda (2004)
  • Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989)
  • Grudge, The (2004)
  • Death at a Funeral (2007)
  • Condemned, The (2007)
  • Born into Brothels (2004)
  • Bedazzled (2000)
  • A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Book Review - Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy (2003)

I can say, with some modesty, that I am familiar with the subject of mathematics more than an average person is. Despite that I hadn’t ever ...