

Recipes devised by IBM supercomputer - dsizzle
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672444/try-a-recipe-devised-by-ibms-supercomputer-chef

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dekhn
Most of the quality of a dish comes not from the selection of ingredients, but
having a good understand of mouth physics and chemistry. That's mentioned in
the article, but given the same ingredients, a great chef can make a far more
appealing dish. This would involve steps like browning, careful heat control
to obtain Maillard reactions, heat control to get crunchy dried texture
surrounding a soft interior (crunch followed by burst of flavor is always a
winner).

basically: fry bacon til crisp, dry, pour a little melted chocolate on it, add
crispy bacon (fried until brown), decorate with thinly sliced mint. The
different between an unskilled chef and a skilled chef making this dish will
greatly outweight any dish the IBM supercomputer invents by combining
incredients. Why? bacon is high in umami, it's crisp, the chocolate provides
the sweet and bitter flavors, and the mint contains tons of aromatic
molecules.

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dsizzle
Doesn't much of the "mouth physics and chemistry" depend on the ingredient
selection?

>"bacon is high in umami, it's crisp, the chocolate provides the sweet and
bitter flavors, and the mint contains tons of aromatic molecules."

Bacon is always high in umami, chocolate is always sweet and bitter, etc.

I do wonder about your point regarding technique... would a recipe be rated
differently if the bacon wasn't crispy?

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dekhn
Sorry, I meant to come back and clarify: the ingredient part of what I listed
could be discovered easily. Knowing how to balance all the levels of crispy,
the sweet/bitter/fat of the chocolate, etc, at runtime is much harder. You can
include those things in the cost function for the heuristic search, but
they're harder to achieve that naive assembly of the ingredients.

