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Just based on the experiences I have with them, I feel like the Big Problem with recommendation engines is that they're bad at teasing out why somebody liked so
by 0xcde4c3db 7y ago
Just based on the experiences I have with them, I feel like the Big Problem with recommendation engines is that they're bad at teasing out why somebody liked something and end up falling back on an obfuscated equivalent of P(likes A | likes B), which ends up dominated by people obsessed with a particular genre, franchise, or theme. Or worse, it relies on extremely generic tags. If you buy, say, Steins;Gate and Rosenkreuzstilette on Steam, it's going to keep recommending the most garbage VNs and PG-13 nukige on the planet until the sun explodes because you obviously like VNs and anime (as opposed to quirky sci-fi stories and Mega Man).
There's a paragraph about this in the article that discusses automated identification of clusters, but it makes it sound like there was a lot of human judgment/guesswork in figuring out why any given set of movies clusters the way it does.
> Each new algorithm takes on average three or four hours to churn through the data on the family’s “quad core” Gateway computer.
Huh. I don't think I would have guessed that Gateway was still around in the days of quad-core desktops.
- djtriptych 7y agoAlso why is quad core in quotes lol. Is it really like four old Pentium IIIs in a compute cluster?
- scrooched_moose 7y agoThe article is from 2008. Multicore was still pretty novel at the time. The Core2 Quad series released early 2007. I'm not 100% that was the first Intel consumer quad chip (memory is pretty fuzzy by now) but it was close.
- Double_a_92 7y agoCould this be solved by weighting things that are generally popular less while learning? E.g. if you like a super popular Anime, say DragonBall, it doesn't mean that you necessarily like Anime. But if you like some super niche Anime it's more likely that you would enjoy more of that. Because why would you have found and enjoyed that without some specific interest?
- darepublic 7y agoWhat we need is to monitor people's brains in some way while they are watching entertainment to see specifically what gets evoked and when. I would do it if I had the means. Then we can create original stories again, and run them through our models of human amusement and catharsis to know who will enjoy what and why and when.
- asdfman123 7y agoI remember briefly reading about how Pandora classified music -- by getting people to analyze each song for different qualities (e.g. fast paced, melancholy, etc. etc.), and that was a key part of their "recommendation engine." You could ask people "What did you like about this movie?" and they could tag various things they liked about it, e.g. "was smart," "cheesy humor" or "had Jennifer Lawrence." Heck, that sounds like something that might be worth building, a tag-based movie recommendation engine.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sverige 7y agoNo need for all that. There are no original stories, only variations on the ancient ones. Here's one summary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situ... As for who will enjoy what etc., there are entire industries that spend their efforts on knowing that, like Nielsen and Rotten Tomatoes.
- the_gipsy 7y agoIIRC it was further simplified to just combinations of rise and fall of characters.
- danShumway 7y agoThese are extremely broad categories. It's a bit like saying, "there are no original books, they're all just collections of the same 26 letters", or "all stories are the same, they're just characters doing things." One category listed here is Pursuit: > the fugitive flees punishment for a misunderstood conflict. Example: Les Misérables By this logic, 'Les Miserables', 'Mission Impossible', and 'Catch Me if You Can' are all just rehashing the same basic idea. On an existential level, sure, but is there any practical use to a category that broad?
- scrooched_moose 7y agoYeah. I avoid rating anything unless my feelings about the movie generally extend to the entire genre. Like 'Shrek'? Enjoy recommendations for kids movies for the next 3 months. Like 'Before Sunrise'? You're going to love The Tall Girl!