IBM Supercomputer 'Watson' Turns Hand To Cooking

The super computer that won Jeopardy! is now turning its hand to cooking. IBM's Watson has come up with some unlikely recipes including a strawberry curry.

IBM originally developed the supercomputer specifically to compete on the game show called Jeopardy!. It was considered a major challenge for a computer as Jeopardy! doesn't simply require players to know facts, but to decipher clues. While normal game shows have a question with a single answer, winning Jeopardy! means finding the most likely of all possible questions that could relate to the supplied answer.

Watson proved up to the challenge and comprehensively defeated two former champions, using four terabytes (four thousand gigabytes) of data on a hard drive, and not using an Internet connection.

Watson Already Gives Medical Advice

Since then, IBM has licensed the technology for a range of uses, particularly in medicine. In theory it should be particularly suited to identifying possible conditions from known symptoms.

In practice it has so far been mainly used to identify the best treatment for people diagnosed with particular conditions such as lung cancer. Part of Watson's success in this field comes from its ability to sift through huge amounts of data from past clinical trials and medical records to find connections between specific characteristics in patients and successful or failed treatment elements.

The latest use of the technology comes from food magazine "Bon Appetit," which has worked with IBM to develop Chef Watson, an app designed to create recipes. It does so by combining information from three main sources.

Food App Takes Methodical Approach

The first is a database of 9,000 recipes printed in the magazine over the years. The second is a database of the various chemical compounds from individual ingredients and the way they combine to affect flavor. The third is data about the reactions humans have to specific flavors.

Many of the recipes Chef Watson has created sound bizarre but make logical sense when broken down. For example, it created a variant of apple pie that favored the cuisine in the Baltic region. What makes it particularly unusual is that it has a layer of pork tenderloin. (Source: foodperestroika.com)

The BBC notes that the app, which is being released to the general public this week, also allows users to generate recipes that meet specific criteria such as being gluten-free or minimizing food waste. (Source: bbc.co.uk)

What's Your Opinion?

Can a computer ever match human chefs when it comes to designing tasty dishes? Is cookery a chemistry "problem" that can be solved with a logical algorithm? Or is it more of an art that relies on human intuition?