How we came to eat the things that we do in the way that we do has likely been the byproduct of thousands of years of trial and error. Before we figured out that you could pair milk with cereal someone had to try cereal mixed with apple or orange juice. Yuck! Or just imagine walking down the beach trying everything you could find, seaweed, clams, jellyfish, etc. to figure out what was edible and what wasn’t. I’m a picky eater as it is. Being an ancient taste tester would not have been for me. Thankfully, we won’t have to worry about that anymore. Going forward new food combinations will be concocted, not by human chefs, but by an advanced artificial intelligence, IBM’s Watson.
After winning Jeopardy, Watson turned its attention to healthcare, working with hospitals to diagnose rare diseases, thanks to its astonishing ability to read one million books per second. At the time I wondered what Watson would turn to next for an encore and now we know. Watson in a partnership with McCormick & Company will turn its attention to creating food recipes. Rare, never before created recipes that no human could have ever come up with due to their complexity and chefs natural predisposition to certain favored ways of doing things.
As Futurism puts it, “Each human developer comes with biases. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; they may simply have favorite or go-to ingredients, like particular spices, that are over-represented in their formulas. But because IBM’s AI, largely comprised of a massive neural network, is trained on decades of McCormick data, the system is able to consider alternatives outside of a particular expert’s wheelhouse.
The algorithm also absorbed contextual data from decades of market research — the neural net processed data on people’s preferences based on factors like their culture, location, and moods.”
The end result is a system that is capable of considering food combinations that have never been tried before giving hope that we could be on the verge of revolutionizing the food industry. Imagine for instance if something as amazing as pizza was only just now getting discovered. How much would a discovery of that magnitude change the world? Which begs the question: what new foods will be discovered next?!
Is a new food algorithm the Greatest Idea Ever?
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