IBM's Watson Made Me A Kebab
Watson's Apple Kebab Colin Lecher You've probably heard of Watson, IBM's super-intelligent supercomputer that dominated on Jeopardy! not too long ago. Turns out he's not a bad cook, either. At South By Southwest, IBM has set up a food truck staffed with chefs from the Institute of Culinary Education, who are whipping up (strange, uncanny, surprisingly tasty) daily recipes dreamed up by the machine. Here's the background. For about two years, IBM has been working on a way to harness Watson's data-driven computing into more creative fields--the kinds of things where, unlike a game show, there's no one right answer. The first experiment with that has been in the kitchen. By mining a database of freely available online recipes (as well as recipes from professional chefs and a molecular textbook) and estimating which ingredients might combine for a dish pleasing to a human palate, Watson...