What would a computer cook for dinner?
Anybody who has been to British chef Heston Blumenthal's world-famous Fat Duck restaurant in the UK village of Bray will know that strange flavours do work together.
There egg and bacon ice cream, snail porridge and tobacco-infused chocolate were born.
Blumenthal has acquired something of a mad scientist reputation - half chef, half molecular physicist - but even he might raise an eyebrow at the possibility that a computer could create such daring and flavoursome recipes.
But that is exactly what IBM is setting out to do as its increasingly intrepid supercomputer Watson takes on that most human of activities - cooking.
Watson's flavourbots will be churning out recipes at the annual interactive, film and music festival SXSW, offering visitors to its base in Austin, Texas some hopefully algorithmically delicious dishes, served via a food van.
Conference goers will be asked to vote on the dishes that they would like Watson to cook each day via Twitter using the #IBMFoodTruck hashtag.
Behind this food truck is a cognitive computer dreaming up algorithmically delicious dishes
There are hundreds of thousands of different flavour combinations in the world so the idea that an algorithm is best placed to sort through them to come up with some novel ways to tickle our taste-buds isn't as strange as it may sound.
Watson will sift through some weird and wonderful ingredients and attempt to come up with some original but tasty new recipes.
So how do you fancy Italian grilled lobster followed by Baltic apple pie?
"We made an Italian grilled lobster that paired saffron, tomato, pumpkin, mint, olives, orange and bacon - something that we would never have thought of putting all together," said Florian Pinel, senior software engineer at IBM Watson Group.
"The Baltic apple pie... with apple, blueberries, apricots, ginger, pork, garlic and onion is another recipe that you won't find at any bakery I know of," he added.
Baltic Apple Pie might shock eaters when they hit the pork layer
To help it in its task to become a Michelin-starred cyborg chef Watson will have access to a database of recipes containing tens of thousands of existing dishes.
A second database will provide data on the flavour compounds in thousands of ingredients and it will also have to hand psychological data about how humans perceive different flavour combinations.
Watson will not be cooking up its own creations, largely because it has no hands.
Instead the food it creates at SXSW will be cooked by a group of chefs from the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE).
IBM is keen to stress that this is not about machines outdoing humans but rather working side by side with them.
Creole Shrimp Dumplings is one of the dishes the computer has created in the past
Full Article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26352743
