Creative recipes from the computer

The ChefWatson Application is brilliant application: uses the “brain” of IBM’s supercomputer to create and offer a variety of recipes. The American company associated with the Bon Appetit recipe search portal that has more than nine thousand recipes.

The key to the ChefWatson app is the supercomputer's ability to devour large amounts of information and make links between chunks of it. It has already proved its mettle by winning the quiz show Jeopardy! and is being used to help doctors make cancer diagnoses at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York. Now it is attempting to do something computers usually find difficult: using creativity to invent recipes people will actually want to eat.

To provide the data, IBM teamed up with US recipe website Bon Appetit. This has a database of more than 9000 recipes, tagged according to their ingredients, type of dish and cooking style – Cajun or Thai, for example. Watson creates a statistical correlation between ingredients, styles and recipe steps in the database and uses this to work out which ingredients usually go together and what each type of food requires. “That's how it knows that a burrito, a burger and a soup all need different elements,” says IBM's Steve Abrams. “It knows a burrito always needs a wrapper of some sort, whereas soup always needs liquid. That's how you don't get a runny burrito.” (origo.hu)