Deloitte Looks For Solutions By Sponsoring Kaggle Competition

Professional services firm, Deloitte, is sponsoring a competition with Kaggle.com that aims to remake the famous ELO chess rating system, which the World Chess Federation uses to determine player rankings. The winner of the Deloitte/FIDE Chess Rating Challenge will not only win the opportunity to present their findings to the Federation, but they'll also walk away with a $10,000 prize provided by Deloitte.

Here's the way Kaggle works. Companies, governments and researchers provide datasets and problems to Kaggle. Then Kaggle's network of data scientists compete to produce the best crowd-sourced solutions to the presented problem. At the end of a competition, the competition sponsor pays prize money in exchange for the intellectual property behind the winning model.

Contest participants for the Deloitte competition are being asked to refine their rating systems using a dataset of over 1.84 million game results for more than 54,000 chess players across a recent eleven year period.

Kaggle writes:

It is impossible to know at the outset which technique will be most effective. By exposing the problem to a wide audience, with different participants trying different techniques, competitions can very quickly have you reach the frontier of what's possible from a given dataset.

Between January and March, Ford sponsored the "Stay Alert!" challenge that asked users to design a device that would detect whether the driver is alert or not alert, employing a combination of vehicular, environmental and driver physiological data. Nearly 180 teams completed the competition.