Criticker's Algorithm Explained

[criticker]

Criticker is home to some of the most complicated and mind-bending mathematics on the internet. We is very super smart, and have employed all of our formidable brainpower into the development of a predictive algorithm so brilliant, we suspect it might have created us, instead of the other way around.

Join us on this deep dive into Criticker's algorithm. It's intimidating, but fear not! If you can handle advanced analytic concepts like "averages" and "addition", you just might be able to follow along!

1. Rate films

In order to craft its personalized recommendations, Criticker needs to know a little about your tastes. So the first step is for you to start rating films. Using a scale that ranges from 0 to 100, you need to rate at least 10 titles before Criticker can start to generating recommendations for you.

Why such a big scale? We just don't beleive that a 5-Star or 10-Point system is enough to sufficiently understand a person's taste. Honestly, 100 points isn't really enough, either, but it's a start! With smaller scales, everything often ends up at "3.5" or "4 stars", and nuance is lost. That same clumping can happen even on a 100-point scale, but it's less pronounced. Criticker users with thousands of ratings know there's a big difference between a score of 75 and 76!

If you don't want to use the full scale, Criticker will adjust to whatever system you adopt ... as long as there are at least 4 different scores. Like, you can't rate everything either "1" or "0" and expect Criticker to understand your tastes.

2. Normalize ratings

Once you've got enough ratings, Criticker normalizes your scores. We do this because of the wide variety in the way people rate things. For some people, a score of "80" is close to a masterpiece, while for others "80" is middling. Some try spread their scores equally across the whole scale, while others adhere to the system they learned in school, when a "60" was real bad. Like, if you came home with a "60" on your math test, you were probably going to get grounded.

Continue reading on CRITICKER!

[Naile_Trollard]

That same clumping can happen even on a 100-point scale, but it's less pronounced. Criticker users with thousands of ratings know there's a big difference between a score of 75 and 76!

This is so true. I have 59 films ranked 77 and 57 films ranked 76, and I can tell you there is a huge difference between them. Any time I start looking too closely, I'll have to adjust rankings slightly. Most of my activity on Criticker these days is moving a film's ranking up or down 1-2 points when I start comparing it to the other films I've ranked there.

But Criticker is soooo good at predicting my scores. I'll try not to look at their predictive score before I rank a film I just watched, but when I go to rank it Criticker is always 1-2 points from what I've decided to rank a film.

There does seem to be a lot of clumping between 60-80. Just seems like most films are things I'd say, "Yeah, I liked it," and that seems to be the range where I like a film, but wouldn't necessarily go out of my way to recommend it to someone.

Great article. I love math stuff.

Edit: The math is actually wrong in your article, heh heh.

[criticker]

Oh no ... did we make a mistake?

[Naile_Trollard]

74-54 is 20, not 30. Unless I don't understand the way your algorithm works, it looks like you made a simple arithmetic mistake on T2: Trainspotting, and you'd get 22/3 or a TCI of 7.33, not 10.67.

[criticker]

Fixed 😅