Together with the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), the Jeopardy! winning computer has created perhaps the world’s first-ever cookbook co-created by computer algorithms. “Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson” is available on Amazon.
Watson is built to mirror the same learning process that we have—through the power of cognition. What drives this process is a common cognitive framework that humans use to inform their decisions: Observe, Interpret, Evaluate, and Decide. Watson takes in data from all sorts of sources, from research reports to Tweets. All the information humans produce for other humans to consume.
Chef Watson understands food on a molecular level, and works off the theory that things that share similar flavor compounds taste good together. That knowledge makes Watson an interesting sidekick for both professional chefs and home cooks.
In Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson, IBM’s unprecedented technology and ICE’s culinary experts present more than 65 original recipes exploding with irresistible new flavors. The first thing noticed was that the menu was like a very strange fusion restaurant. There was a Turkish-Korean Caesar salad, Indian turmeric paella and Belgian bacon pudding for dessert. Watson is coming at recipes with no preconceived notions of what they should be. It will throw together ingredients with more freedom than us humans, who may not like cooking certain things or using specific ingredients. Plus, its database pulls from cuisines of about 30 countries.
Users can select recipes with Watson. They start by giving it some parameters about what ingredients to include and what to exclude. There’s also a slider that goes from “keep it classic” to “surprise me.” Watson gets its ideas from a database of 10,000 Bon Appétit recipes. Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson introduces home cooks and professional chefs to a whole new world of culinary possibilities.
But the technology is still evolving. It was only last year that regular people were able to start accessing Chef Watson, and there’s a reminder on the site that Watson “eats data, not real food … give us feedback to make the Chef smarter.”
Sources: money.cnn.com, ibm.com, amazon.com