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It might just be the smartest company in the world; responsible for solving some of the toughest problems ever posed - from accurately mapping Dark Matter in the Universe to how to avoid buying dodgy vehicles at a used car auction.

Kaggle – a collection of more than 17,000 PhD-level brains who compete for prizes in solving incredibly complex questions – is using the power of the internet to accelerate problem solving on a massive scale.

Essentially, it's crowd sourcing for geniuses.

Questions that have confounded scientists for years are being solved in months now thanks to Kaggle's unique approach to data analysis.

The company specializes in creating competitions – with valuable prizes – for its roster of 17,000 "mathletes" around the world to solve. Swathes of data are made available to the Kaggle mathletes who vie to produce the way to make the raw data meaningful.

To date Kaggle has crunched data on Dark Matter, predicting which used cars are likely to be bad buys, improve the World Chess Federation's official chess rating system, and predicting the most effective treatment for HIV.

Many of Kaggle's top performing mathletes are British.

Jason Tigg, a London-based particle physicist, finished third in a competition to improve the World Chess Federations' official chess rating system and is currently coming second in a competition to predict the reliability of used cars.

Martin O'Leary, a PhD student in glaciology from the University of Cambridge recently won a competition to mathematically model the tiny distortions in images of the galaxy, thought to be dark matter - the mysterious matter that scientists believe makes up most of the universe. The Mapping Dark Matter problem was posted on Kaggle and in less than a week, Martin created an algorithm that outperformed the most commonly used models for mapping dark matter.

Neil Rimer, founder and partner of Index Ventures, who have just invested in the business, said:"Working on such a diverse range of problems with such a huge array of brains from around the world might sound incredibly daunting. But at the heart of the Kaggle business is a very simple concept; opening up big problems to the people best able to solve them. It's a business that couldn't exist before the internet, and is a terrific example of the way web can improve all our lives in both very profound and very simple ways."