[opendtv] Re: Users as Toast: The Blocking of Google TV

$25 dollars down and over to you Bill Cullen.

On 11/16/2010 12:21 AM, Kon Wilms wrote:

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 5:44 PM, Cliff Benham<flyback1@xxxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:

If you are referring to TiVo's pathetic "Suggestions from Tivo" I give it 5
thumbs down everytime, all the time
and it finally has gone away and not bothered me for months.

How can any one possibly know all my interests and what programs I might
want to watch?

It doesn't. It basically uses a linear weighted prediction algorithm
based on explicit and implicit viewer preferences.

In other words, everything goes in a bucket, the processor lade is
turned, and things you thumbed up/down and things tivo thinks you
would have thumbed up float to the top, passing through a tide of
server-side secret sauce.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/4599661/TiVo-Making-Show-Recommendations-Using-a-Distributed-Collaborative-Filtering-Architecture

Now as for the 'AI' part of the document, I'm not buying it entirely.
Processing that much data efficiently is done best with distributed
hash tables, and there isn't much AI involved on computing a hash,
just a bunch of if then else.. oh I think the result is statistically
close enough to Y for reasons A,B,C, so let's serve it.


My suspicion is that TiVo's suggestions are made solely on how much money a
  program's viewing could make for them and the program supplier by having
the greatest number of viewers, and are not in any way based on the
educational, social or performance quality available in that program.

BINGO!

Cheers
Kon




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