I just read the article about Netflix’ Million Dollar Programming Prize on IEEE Spectrum.

Robert M. Bell, Jim Bennett, Yehuda Koren, and Chris Volinsky, The Million Dollar Programming Prize, IEEE Spectrum Online, http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may09/8788.

Interesting article, showing again how contests proposing a challenge can inspire a lot of great work, and allow an ‘objective’ comparison between algorithms. I think they provide a great way to motivate researchers to work on real problems, with testing on standardized datasets.