Kaggle opens its competitions
In the spring of 2010 Kaggle Pty Ltd opened a platform for forecasting competitions: an organisation posts data and a prize, analysts submit solutions, the best takes the prize. The first competition was a forecast of the Eurovision vote with a $1,000 prize; on 30 May 2010 Kaggle announced the winner among 22 teams.
Why it matters
A market appeared in which a machine learning problem is set as a competition with a prize and a public leaderboard. Large research competitions later ran on the platform, ARC Prize 2025 among them.
The archived site of 11 March 2010 still shows only a demo site and a mailing list; the copy of 17 April shows the Eurovision Voting competition with two entries and a $1,000 prize pool. The winner was Jure Zbontar, a 25-year-old computer scientist from the University of Ljubljana; five teams of 22 predicted Germany's win. By Kaggle's own account the participants' consensus picked seven of the top ten countries against five for the bookmakers; these are the organiser's figures with no independent check. The record does not deal with Google's purchase of Kaggle in 2017.