Watson Tries to Understand Creativity
May 13, 2013
IBM’s Watson has already conquered Jeopardy, but now he aims to conquer the kitchen in inventing new culinary delights. Fast Company notes the endeavor in“Try The First Recipe Devised By IBM’s Supercomputer Chef.” Taking on cooking is part of IBM’s goal to master the art of creativity. Unlike chess and trivia questions, cooking has billions of random decisions that have a positive or negative impact on the dish, not to mentioned one person might enjoy it, but another may not. Lav Varshney, the project head, is aware of this conundrum and he does not let it hold him back.
“‘We’ve been interested in pushing computing to a new direction, computational creativity. We’re trying to draw on data sets, not just to make inferences about the world, but to create new things you’ve never seen,’ Varshney says.”
To experiment with creative cooking, the cyberchef AI references three databases: cooking basics, hedonic psychophysics, i.e. flavor compounds, and chemoinformatics-a combo of the prior two. The AI already has created new dishes, but it ranks the ones that are most flavorful and novel at the top of the list. The ranking exists to maximize creative potential. IBM has stated that unlike its previous creations Deep Blue and Watson, the cyberchef AI is made to be a collaborative system. IBM’s deep-set idea is that robots will not replace humans, but rather save it, i.e. combating obesity. If humans cannot find the solution why not turn to an objective source. It may prove to work.
Whitney Grace, May 13, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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