Steve Abrams, the director of IBM's Watson Life research program, told Quartz that Watson scanned publicly available data sources to build up a vast library of information on recipes, the chemical compounds in food, and common pairings. (For any budding gastronomers out there, Abrams said Wikia was a surprisingly useful source.) Knowledge that might've taken a lifetime for a Michelin-starred chef to attain can now be accessed instantly from your tablet.
The Watson team has actually published a cookbook of its AI-inspired dishes in partnership with the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), which launches April 14. While Quartz has not been able to test out Watson's esoteric parings yet, here are some that stood out:
- Belgian bacon pudding, a desert containing dried porcini mushrooms
- Vietnamese apple kebab, with the vaunted mushroom-and-strawberry pairing
- Portuguese lobster roll, with appetizing "saffron fluid gel"
- Hoof-n-Honey ale, with veal stock
- Thai-Jewish chicken, with potato latkes and rice balls
- The shrimp cocktail, which is a beverage with actual shrimp in it
- Kenyan Brussels spouts, with cardamom
It sounds like another sort of molecular gastronomy. Have any Soylentils eaten recipes like that? Does it work?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday April 14 2015, @06:37PM
That one's true. I read a report at (only slightly after) the time. So they had to purge the database and retrain it. Not a big deal, they were, after all, working on a copy and doing it as an experiment.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.