Cooking with my Computer

We’re used by now to celebrity chefs, those hard-working, talented people who inhabit kitchens and TV cooking and reality shows, and turn out their own cookbooks.  Have you heard of Chef Watson?

Maybe not, but he’s a celebrity chef anyway, and of a different sort, because Chef Watson is … a computer.

Watson, IBM’s human-beating technology, first appeared on a Jeopardy show in 2011, handily beating the human champions, in a quiz show that uses quintessentially human qualities – such as understanding arcane clues in natural, as opposed to, computer language.  Being a computer, Watson also ingests vast amounts of data, and it doesn’t forget, doesn’t get fatigued, get confused or have human frailties such as prejudices and preferences.  What’s more, Watson operates at blinding speeds.

Now Watson, which learns on the go and improves over time, has come to the kitchen. 

Watson is very ‘smart’, but completely child-like, having no knowledge of its own. Everything must be taught by humans, but if Watson is trained in a particular subject, that it learns and adapts rapidly.  Like a baby, Watson needs to be fed, but instead of food, what it eats is data - lots and lots of it.

In this case, Chef Watson was taught about cooking, and not just cooking, but also ingredients, the chemical composition of ingredients, what tastes good to humans, what doesn’t, the differences between different types of cuisines, the differences between a roast and a soup, a soup and a stew, between different cuisine types such as Japanese and Korean, for example.  It knows a lot more about food than any human can – after all, how many of us can remember the hundreds and hundreds of chemicals that go into any food item such as a tomato, or chili?

As a base, Watson was also fed 9000 recipes from Bon Appetit.  The interesting thing about Watson is that it only knows what it knows.  If there are no recipes which use, say, sea cucumber, Watson will have no idea what to do with a sea cucumber.  For a sample of Chef Watson’s adventures, check out: http://www.bonappetit.com/tag/chef-watson

Why would anyone teach a computer about food when there are already millions of people who obsess about it on a regular basis – what to eat for lunch, for example?  The idea is for Watson to learn what it does, and to develop recipes never seen or tried before.  In that context, Watson has some advantages.

Unlike humans, Watson doesn’t have knee-jerk reactions to what will work and what won’t.  It also understands how different flavours work together at a chemical level, and what combinations of chemicals tend to work well and what doesn’t.

And indeed, even professional chefs have been surprised by some of Watson’s unusual food combinations.  Although it comes up with ingredients, it needs humans to decide on the proportions and to do the actual cooking and presentation. 

In a further leap of Watson’s culinary adventures, IBM also partnered with the Institute of Culinary Education to come up with a cookbook. Featuring 65 original recipes, the cookbook “Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson: Recipes for Innovation from IBM & the Institute of Culinary Education”, is available for sale.

But you can decide for yourself, because a beta app is available for use.  In the app, you can tell Chef Watson what ingredients you want to use, what you want to exclude, and you can also set a slider scale on how adventurous you want the results to be.  Chef Watson can adapt on the fly, meaning you can tweak the surprise level, or the types of ingredients, as you go along.

Crucially, how does the food taste?  The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so why not try it out yourself? Just register, for free, at www.ibmchefwatson.com and surprise yourself.   Happy cooking!