IBM's supercomputer Watson is getting a chef's toque.
Well, if a rat can do it. I'm reminded, you see, of Remy the rat in Ratatouille, probably the best movie about life in a professional restaurant kitchen ever made. Remy, inspired by the spirit of the great deceased chef Auguste Gusteau, painstakingly teaches himself to cook -- at the very highest level.
And it's not easy for a rat, manipulating those huge pots, stirring the stocks, peeling the potatoes. Some of this, I'm guessing, can't be easy for a computer, either.
In fact, we're not going to see Watson working the line, as the expression goes. Not even doing the dishes. What the self-educating cognitive powerhouse can bring to the party is skill in creating recipes.
This is related, of course, to the sensory possibilities being developed in the cognitive computing field, as explained in our new Web Wise World tutorial. Watson's capabilities will be previewed at its Almaden Research Center today:
The uses it will be showing off to Wall Street analysts... include helping to develop drugs, predicting when industrial machines need maintenance and even coming up with novel recipes for tasty foods.
Watson has collaborated with an instructor from Manhattan's Institute for Culinary Education and come up with a pastry called a Spanish crescent. Utilizing its database of 20,000 recipes, together with chemical information on ingredients and data on subjective preferences, Watson decided the pastry should contain "cocoa, saffron, black pepper, almonds and honey."
Not sure about the cocoa there, but I have a dollar that says it's going to look like a croissant.
Now these are clearly baby steps. The human chef played the not insignificant role of adjusting the proportions in the recipe and actually making it. Maybe he took the cocoa out. Skeptics might argue that a human cook just doesn't need that much data to come up with a honey and almond breakfast pastry.
Watson the chef has some catching up to do, too. Allrecipes, reputed to be the world's largest online recipe database, lists ingredients and preparation steps for more than 4,000 dishes. I'm no more than a decent home cook, but it took me two seconds to think of a classic recipe it doesn't list (brains in black butter, yum). Watson may have been fed 20,000 recipes, but with professional chefs under pressure to conjure new marvels all the time, that's probably a fraction of what's out there.
And with combinations like these already available, novelty is a tall order, too:
Hanger steak, egg, cocoa, melba
Flatiron steak, mushroom jerky, grapes
Sweetbread, burrata, purple potato ice cream
Those are all real dishes from current New York restaurant menus.
In fact, what we need to do is keep reminding ourselves that we're on the brink of a new age in computing, and how far we've come. From the fallible chess-playing computers of the 1970s to IBM's Deep Blue beating Gary Kasparov in 1996 was a long haul. Today we're talking about computers that can actually interact with their environment and teach themselves by doing so.
I don't know how soon we'll see Watson itself pop a cake in the oven, but I already trust it more than a rat. Sorry, Remy.
Fascinating, Kim. And, Sunita, I like your idea of adjusting the recipes to the tastes of the customer - now that sounds great!
The opportunity to perfect recipes and consistently deliver ingredients that produce flawless cooking/baking sounds great. It certainly seems within the capabilities of Watson, as long as it is fed the right learning tools.
Imagine the ability to customize and/or provide recipes for people on different diets, food allergies, food preferences, etc.
Very good question, Sunita, and I don't know the answer. If machine learning is going to be used for Watson to educate itself on food, you would expect this to happen.
@sarahp, I am also curious to know the receipes tastes ? After winning the game show Jeopardy I will not be surprised if Watson also wins the "Masterchef Australia" title in future.
@Kim, am curious to know if the data is fedback into this system ? For example will the quantified taste data of the dish which it creates fed back into the system ?
We're not really seeing anything close to individualized recipes yet, are we? These are amazing steps, but putting almonds and honey in a croissant...there's a long way to go.
I wonder how good Watson's receipes will be? It seems like since it will be left with a computer, then that will leave an error for bad ideas. I hope that I am wrong, but I think it will be a good while before most of us even have a clue as to what it comes up with in terms of food.
Professional chefs don't have to worry just yet. Watson still can't actually cook. He can come up with recipes, though.
I'm reminded of an earlier IBM prediction: That Watson and his descendants will be able to come up with custom recipes for foods that are both nutritious and delicious, tailored for each individual's biochemistry and taste.
Yes, you could probably get Paula Dean, Emeril, Rachel Ray, and a whole kitchen full of professional chefs (I don't really know that many, hence the short list!) for the price of Watson!
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Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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