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AI Robotics

A Christmas Menu Dreamed Up by a Robot (bbc.com) 42

For most of us, using up the Christmas leftovers means endless rounds of turkey sandwiches and lashings of Brussel sprout curry in the days leading up to New Year. So, to help inject some creativity into this year's leftover eat-up, BBC turned to artificial intelligence for some culinary assistance. From a report: A number of research teams around the world have been developing AI systems that are capable of learning from existing recipes and then coming up with some of their own. We asked researchers behind two innovative algorithms to see what their AI's take would be on Christmas food. One, developed by computer scientists at Stanford University, can turn whatever food is left in your fridge into a unique recipe based on those ingredients. The other, created by AI researchers at the University of Illinois, puts a cultural twist on a meal by creating dishes from one country in the style of another cuisine.

The first algorithm, called Forage, uses a type of AI known as deep neural networks, which attempts to replicate the way the human brain works. Networks like these are able to handle problems involving complex data and are increasingly being used to tackle tasks as diverse as controlling self-driving cars and recognising the early signs of cancer in health scans. [...] The second algorithm we used was developed by Lav Varshney and his team at the University of Illinois. It was trained on nearly 40,000 recipes from 20 different countries using a system that can apply semantic reasoning to replace certain ingredients with those it considers to be equivalent from a different cuisine.

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A Christmas Menu Dreamed Up by a Robot

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  • Just correlating stuff without understanding does not work and can only succeed by chance. Understanding, however, remains firmly in the hands of humans, machines have not even demonstrated they may potentially one day far in the future have any say in that.

    • You're being just as derpy from the other side of the ignorance field, though.

      Whatever understanding humans have, they can program it into the machine. AI isn't "artificial," because it isn't actually animism. You recognize that it isn't animism, and yet you don't bother to think about what it actually is; human thoughts, human ideas, human analysis, formalized into a system of rules.

      Your comment is as nonsensical as saying that when a human learns how to cook by following a recipe, it is no longer human un

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Whatever understanding humans have, they can program it into the machine.

        Nope. The whole history of CS serves as proof of that. "Understanding" can in no way, form or shape be programmed and that is the current state of things.

        • I made claims, you waved your hands dismissively without actually making a claim.

          You didn't convince me that you understood my point, and you didn't convince me that you had an alternate point.

          I'll program some understanding in C for you, as an example.

          int foo = 0;

          The code understands that there is a piece of integer data, and it understands that the value is 0. This is because the engineers who designed the computers built them to have operations specific to a defined concept called an "int

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Just correlating stuff without understanding does not work and can only succeed by chance. Understanding, however, remains firmly in the hands of humans, machines have not even demonstrated they may potentially one day far in the future have any say in that.

      Well, in this case we're not really giving the robot a chance because it's denied access to the underlying data, all it gets is ingredients and recipes. All you can get is a "turn this summer photo into a winter photo" without any idea of the physical process behind it. If you gave it access to the chemical composition of the ingredients and the transformations caused by cooking, roasting etc. and it was eaten by sensors that could detect flavors like sweet, sour, salt, bitter and umami, smell, temperature

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        You cannot give the "robot" the full experience without giving it consciousness. Nobody today even knows what that is.

  • Relevant XKCD (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pushing-robot ( 1037830 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2018 @02:31PM (#57858002)
  • by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2018 @02:36PM (#57858018) Homepage Journal
    If AI systems really worked, why would you apply them to creating recipes, playing Go, and playing Chess? I mean, these morons inputted 40,000 recipes in some form and trained a NN against it. Why? Is there no practical use?
    • What a stupid question.
      1. What evidence do you have that it isn't applied for practical uses? Because you are unaware of something, doesn't mean it does not exist.
      2. Why wouldn't you apply it to pretty much everything you can think of? Machine learning is a very, very potent technology that everybody and their dog wants to get a piece of. Governments will apply it to governing, companies to making money and hobbyists will apply it as a pastime.
      Problem?

  • Leftovers? Why not use something like the reverse recipe maker [royalrecipes.com] or one of the bazillions of online utilities like it?

    Why do you need AI to tell you what you can make from a few miscellaneous ingredients? I'm all for useful applications of AI, but this is just stupid.

    • Thank you I had no idea that existed.

    • It is funny because there are already recipes that require leftovers, like chop suey. The name is a westernization of "tsap seui" from Toisan, which means "miscellaneous leftovers."

      The vast majority of the time, leftover ingredients can (and should probably be) made into a generic stir-fry or a bread, depending on if you have a bunch of flour or not.

      The situation itself doesn't really call for a "recipe," it calls for a cooking technique that is flexible and a style of dish that is accommodating to a variet

  • I'm tempted to try it on the ingredient lists from Chopped shows to see what it would come up with. "Your basket has pickled pig lips, squid ink, bitter melon, and kumquats...".

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