

Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson - oxplot
http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Cooking-Chef-Watson-Innovation/dp/149262571X/

======
pesenti
I have read the book and tried Watson food a few times. The book does not hide
the fact that the Watson recipes have been curated/modified by a real Chef
(the book usually tells you about the major modifications). So you could ask:
how is it really different from randomly generated stuff? My experience is
that there is something really distinctive about Watson food: a very unusual
association of a handful of tastes that a regular chef wouldn't have thought
about but that works surprisingly well.

------
quinndupont
I'm excited to buy a copy. It looks beautiful, and in addition to the
interesting recipes there looks to be a decent discussion of how the
computation works (at a high-level, conceptual level; not code).

------
joshuaheard
Take a food combination chart, feed it into an algorithm with a randomizer and
grouping parameters, have a chef pick out some good ones, and voila, a
computer-generated cookbook to use as publicity for your computer and cooking
school.

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Food_Combining_Chart....](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Food_Combining_Chart.png)

------
avmich
[http://www.aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/1986/AAAI86-044.pdf](http://www.aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/1986/AAAI86-044.pdf)

Apparently cooking with AI has some successes in its history.

------
FreakyT
I'm glad they decided to expand the content of their original work into a
full-fledged cookbook!

Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing how some of these taste.

------
madcaptenor
Just heard about this book on the Sporkful podcast on the way into work this
morning.

------
gd2
I try a byte of that.

------
ta9090
Utter marketing fluff. Watson cannot do simple arithmetic, and by extension
certainly does not know how to cook, nor can it learn to understand any
cooking technique. I know folks want to expect a lot from Watson but this is
simply not realistic.

~~~
vonklaus
> Watson cannot do simple arithmetic

Can you provide some sources? I assumed that if Watson could win at Jeopardy,
it would be able to do simple math problems.

Edit: I am not sure what you mean about Watson's inability to do arithmetic.

"The two major goals for IBM and RPI are to improve Watson's mathematical
ability and to aid its recognition and interpretation of new words."

[http://www.gizmag.com/ibm-watson-supercomputer-
rpi/26038/](http://www.gizmag.com/ibm-watson-supercomputer-rpi/26038/)

All accounts seem to allude to Watson's ability to infer natural language and
problem solve, including arithmetic. I have not found anything explicitly
saying it can not perform simple arithmetic.

~~~
ta9090
Read the article/press release carefully and note the donation of Watson
resources to RPI is meant as a testbed for improving its capabilities. Nowhere
will you find an explicit demonstration by IBM of Watson doing math. I've
actually worked with Watson, the question about math comes up quite often, and
people have a lot of great expectations around the general notion of AI and
problem-solving, even wondering if Watson can answer philosophical questions.
But, today, Watson is not built to solve these kinds of problems.

Watson's core capability is natural language processing--to discern the "what"
of an English question, and to match it with germane texts in its corpus.

