Oh the fun we are having ;)

Yes, this is truely an enjoyable challenge. In the process of working with hundreds of millions of records, data base tuning, mathematical paradoxes, and other interesting things, we are learning a lot. And the bonus is these are things that can be applied to our daily challenges at our regular jobs.
Since we are now well into the leader board with a few algorithms, we won't be spoiling things by divulging any 'secrets' here for our competitors. Not that we are even a competitor in this challenge, but hey, you never know who will come up with the magic algorithm in the end. I suspect that like many great inventions, this one may very well come from a group not necessarily specializing in this area, otherwise why would Netflix go 'out-of-the-box' to try and solve an old problem.
Alot of folks think computing power is a big constrainer but I think otherwise. I think the dataset provided is well suited to something like MySQL running on an average home computer. Time will tell.
We should be attempting a submission sometime next week as we are getting probe set results that would put us there.

Data Geeks!..........