The Borg Chef

It's my secret. I'm always hungry. So today for lunch, I went to a local h what would you call it, shrine, local local establishment called eats. It's a Southern cafeteria. It's called Eats. The sign for which I always think. I don't think anybody agrees with me, but to me, the sign for Eats looks like it says ants, so I call it iNTS. So, so lunch there can last upwards of ten years. It really could. It could be in your body that long. Uh, Joe. Joe decided to be

adventurous and try something that he doesn't normally try. Yeah. Well, I didn't like my my new dishes as much today as I like their their standard like jerk chicken, which is pretty good. They're really known for it. But it is definitely always worth being a little adventurous in the kitchen trying something new. Yeah, and and another thing we wanted to mention. The new thing is going to become really important later on and it gets weird, y'all, but

before we get there. Uh, you know, the other thing I wanted to mention is that the kitchen has for a really long time been kind of a gateway to technology in the home. H Yeah. Yeah, people are very technologically adventurous in the kitchen as well as food wise. Yeah. I think I even was looking around and the reason why whenever c e S rolls around that used to be known as the Consumer Electronic Showcase, but now it's

just c E S. Uh. There's always a huge number of various alliances and inventions that our kitchen oriented, and it's largely because when it comes to technology, we tend to adopt it for the kitchen pretty early. People love kitchen gadgets. Yeah, late night TV filled with the various

kitchen gadgets of questionable quality, many of which I own. Uh. So I wanted to talk a little bit about how the kitchen is kind of this this gateway to home automation and programmable appliances before we get into the concept of robot chefs and AI getting involved in our food, just to kind of illustrate how it's been changing, even uh just recently. Oh sure, we take all of these

automated kitchen devices very much for granted. These days, you know, you're your coffee maker that you can program to go off whenever you want coffee, uh, in anticipation of when you're going to want coffee, but which is always. But getting to this point has been kind of uckey. The very first computer that was built for the kitchen was okay, to be fair more of a marketing ploy than it was a real product. But this was in nineteen sixty nine and at the time even Jane Jetson's kitchen still

ran on punch cards. Uh. So to stir up publicity, retailer Neiman Marcus paired up with technology innovator Honeywell to promote a kitchen computer which would plan menus for you based around a single main course. It also weighed about a hundred pounds uh and was so large that it came in the form of like a small kitchen island with a cutting board and everything. Uh, it was it was really a repackaged Honeywell three sixteen, which was a

sixteen bit mini computer. By mini computer, they meant smaller than a room at the time, and and and these things were commonly used in like commercial and industrial applications, So it was it was so complex to use that the come but he has offered a complimentary two week programming course to potential buyers. Like it had it had no screen, It was just like a flashing light display.

The communicated in binary code. So uh, only twenty were ever produced, and those only after public interest was way higher than they anticipated. It was basically it was like, hey, talk about this thing that we might possibly do to be fair Enow, this is an era where people were really looking forward, like the home of the future, right, this this idea of everything is going to be easier from now on because it's all going to be automated. This is still a story we're telling today, but it's

obviously taken a lot longer than what we anticipated. So I'm curious if back in those days, I wanted one of these miraculous machines to grace my kitchen, how much might I be expected to pay for such a thing. Well, it was priced at wow. Yes, but when you account for inflation in today's dollars, that is worth sixty thousand, nine hundred and twenty five So so for the price of just a couple of automobiles, Yeah, it's it's unlikely

that anywhere ever sold. Wow. That's pretty amazing. But you know, obviously that was not just the beginning and the end of this this you know trend in trying to create automated devices for the kitchen. Oh sure, it would take the level of miniaturization and the level of Internet access that came along in the late eighties and early nineties to really kick off the creation of inexpensive and actually marketable devices that do not talk to you in binary code.

The first touchscreen fridge, for example, debuted in from electric Lux, and basically after that, we've been living in a in a rush of kitchen tech. You know, I feel like crowd fun ending websites are just chock full of kitchen gadgets people are trying to fund, like immersion cookers, that kind of thing. I mean, I remember seeing that, like for suvied type approach. I've been seeing those crowdfunded for a while, but all sorts of kitchen gadgets are up there.

And uh, I mean I think of like when you're thinking about the the the history of automation in the kitchen, things like dishwashers obviously spring to mine, and coffee coffee makers, like we were saying earlier, and also things like bread makers. I mean, I remember when bread makers really became a thing. Yeah, my parents got one when I was a kid, and I remember, I remember it being an extremely long, laborious

process to make, even with the bread makers. But if you if you were doing something like putting the ingredients in the morning and starting it off and then just letting it go, then by evening you had a fresh

baked loaf of bread. The house smelled of bread. This was a miracle machine as far as I was concerned, because my mom makes amazing homemade bread, but because doing it by hand is even more laborious than using a bread maker, it was so infrequent that this went that we actually got to have it more often, which in my mind was amazing. Yeah. So some of the things I wanted to mention before we get into the robots stuff, just some some more examples of uh technology that's becoming

available now, stuff that that general automated cooking gadget. Yeah, things that have debuted at c e S recently that kind of stuff. One was the Rodi Matic. I love the name already, but it's an automatic Rodi cooker. So you can get like r O T I R O T I h the Indian pancake type of thing. Yeah, so you just load the ingredients. They have these different canisters that hold the various ingredients so that they mixed them in the proper proportions and and uh you then

said it and it cooks about one per minute. So uh, if I had more room in my kitchen, I would get one of these because I think that is amazing. But I think my wife would kill me. I'm the cook in our family, by the way, so to me, like, these are the things that appeal to me, And then I think I don't have physical space for it, so it's hard for me to justify purchasing it. Um the

Smarter coffee maker. Uh, this is one of those things that you you wouldn't really think you needed until you see it, and then you think, but I don't understand the appeal what's the deal. So the smarter coffee maker goes beyond programming, like we're used to the programmable coffee makers at this point. If you have one of those, then you can you know, you load it up and you say, all right, at at six thirty in the morning,

start brewing my cup of coffee. So that way I have it as soon as I get up and come downstairs or whatever. The smarter coffee maker goes beyond that. You can actually access it through an app. So you use your app to tell your coffee maker exactly how much coffee you want to make, so if you want a big cup of coffee, you say, use this much water versus that much water. Um. It also will keep track of how many beans are still in the coffee maker, so when it gets low, you can reload it add

more beans to it. So uh, kind of an Internet of things approach to making coffee. There was the x y Z printing three D food printer which was shown at c e S that was capable of using sweets ort of cookie dough and printing it in different shapes. So not quite the three D printer that makes a pizza, but one that could make you know Christmas cookies if you wanted or whatever shape cookies you wanted. Uh. So, I don't know how many people would actually get one

of those. Again, like my immediate responses, I totally don't need that, but I totally kind of want one. Uh There was the Pico brew Zymatic, which is an automated beer brewing device. It takes four four hours to brew an unfermented beer. I looked I saw your note on this, and I was like, an unfermented beer fermentation the point of beer. Yeah, it is, no, So the unfermented beer is not what you drink, and so it'll make this and then you can ferment it and then you can

have beer. Because I was thinking what would that be like, I'm sure it would be gross. I don't think they're suggesting you drink it at this stage. En Fermented beer is called wart wart with an o wart word. I don't know how you say it. I guess it's just

we're saying like one of the crunts from Halo. I don't know what you're talking about, not a Halo player anyway, but it's this this sugary grain based liquid that becomes beer through the process fermentation, Right, so this would be something that would speed up that process and automated so that you don't have to have the same level of

um you don't have to babysit it as much. Right, that's the that's the big thing, until you get to the fermentation stage, which obviously would go outside of this this device. Yeah, I was reading a little bit about it and it said that the main appeal of this thing is if you want to be able to experiment with a lot of different recipes with very precise measurements. Also, it appeals to pete who live in a place where they might not have a lot of space to do

this kind of stuff on their own. Uh So, people who might live in an apartment or a townhouse where they don't have like a big garage or something. It was very appealing for those folks as well. Whirlpool went bonkers at c S and showed off a fully interconnected kitchen with all the different appliances able to talk to

all the other different appliances. It even included an interactive backsplash so you could get like recipes printed on your backsplash while you're working on stuff, and cook tops that could actually link to your social media profiles. So if you wanted, if you wanted to take the step out of tweeting what it is you're having for dinner, Jonathan Strickland is using medium high heat exactly. I can't say that I immediately recognized the appeal, but it certainly was

built into it. People are very fond of, you know, posting their dinner. That's true social media, that's true. And you know, if you if you're doing that three times day every day, it just wears out your type and thumb, you know. I feel like people are more fond of posting their brunch or lunch rather than dinner. Maybe I'm wrong. I think it depends on where you're eating, if you're eating at home, um like a weekend to brunch or lunch. I'm sure there's their statistics out there for this big

data get back to us. Yeah. I think it probably also would give you an indication of how well someone's date is going based upon the number and frequency of food related tweets you see from that person. Okay, Jonathan, Sorry, everything you've said so far, I'm unimpressed. I want a robot or cyborg type organism or machine that cooks for me. Well, I have some good news for you, Joe. They're top people. I always want to see top men because that's the raiders.

Come on, let's be fair. There are tough. In fact, one of the people who is behind one of the robots chefs I'm gonna talk about is an eighteen year old lady and she really impressed me because I got to meet her in person on an airplane on the way to see es. But so, why don't we have robot cooks? Well, I mean that's that could be asked about almost anything where. Why don't we have robot butler's. Yeah, well,

why don't we? I mean, that's a good question, and the answer is, actually, I think fairly similar because these jobs require all kinds of versatility, of movement and recognition, you know, multiple different types of artificial intelligence converging on a task. That can become pretty intuitive to us. But think about all the different types of AI it needs. It needs spatial awareness and manipulating objects and visually recognizing things and understanding what tastes are. I mean a lot

of manual dexterity. Yeah, yeah, it is incredibly complicated, but that hasn't stopped various people from trying to create types of robots that would help with cooking. So you know, we've already talked about some automated devices that are you

could think of them almost like robots. Uh. And they certainly have some functions that are are similar to robotic functions, but they're very very specific in there the tasks they can do, which not a big surprise, right, because when we talk about robots, that's that tends to be the case. We talk about people designing robots for very specific tasks. That's way easier than designing a robot for general tasks. So one of those companies is called a Serenity Kitchen.

Serenity is spelled s e r e n e t I. Uh. Yeah, I keep on and calling calling it a sereneti kitgenimate Serenity Kitchen. This is this is the group that I got to meet on an airplane trip to c e S. I was flying in the very back of a plane and the road immediately ahead of me were the people from Serenity Kitchen, which was three young students, uh, one of whom was the person who came up with the idea. She was the brains behind the concept. And it is

a brilliant concept. So the basic idea was that you have a essentially a cooking surface and a robotic arm mounted above the cooking surface, and the robotic arm could create a stirring motion to stir whatever was in a pan that's on top of that cooking service. So you would put ingredients into the pan, the robot arm would continuously stir it until the food is done, and that

way you wouldn't have to babysit stir. Yeah. Yeah, oh that's just just the application for making a ru Yeah, exactly, yeah, something like that. Now they were looking they were actually using it to show off things like pad tai. Uh. They were showing a lot of Eastern dishes and they said, well, we also have applied this for Western dishes like a you know, if you want to make a spaghetti or whatever.

And they said, really, the first target audience, we're looking at our college students, people who would maybe go and buy a cheap microwave dinner, which typically doesn't taste very good and usually isn't very good for you. So what if you would create a device that would make uh,

the the healthy food for you. You You know, you're just dumped the ingredients into whatever and it would do the rest of the work because college students are lazy, and it would allow them to to not have to put forth that kind of effort and they would get the benefit of a healthy dinner h cooked for them. And the brilliant part of their approach was that their plan

wasn't to sell expensive robot cooks. Uh. They were actually looking at using the robot cook is sort of a lost leader the same way that video game consoles come out. That's immediately what I thought of, like that they you know, they're not making a lot of money selling you a PlayStation for something. They're hoping that you're they're going to make it back and you're buying games, right, so instead

of games, we're talking about meals. So they actually compared it to curig, which makes sense, the coffee maker that uses the little pods. They said, well, you know, you could buy this this device, Uh, if you wanted to buy it out right, you could, but would cost somewhere around the neighborhood of five nine U s dollars. It's pretty expensive, you know for something that would not be a direct replacement for a large appliance in your kitchen.

But they had a subscription plan where you can subscribe to a service that would send you the ingredients for ten meals a month for three years. So it's a three year commitment, and then the robot would cost just ninety nine dollars. The subscription would be fifty dollars a month, and that sounds like a lot at first, but then when you figure weight, it's ten meals in a month. That's five bucks a meal. That's a fast food meal

right there, but you're getting fresh ingredients. So the idea being that, uh, you know, this would be a way to get people locked into a system where they would get the delivery ten meals a month. They'd be able to use this. They could use it for other things too, if they had the ingredients on hand, but these would be things that robot would be specifically programmed to handle.

So you put the ingredients in either directly in the p in or their actual plan has a robot that would have trays and you put the ingredients into the the individual trays according to the directions of the recipe, and then the robot would add the ingredients as needed in the process of making that. After two minutes of sauteing the onions, then you put in the carrots, and

then you put in the meat and then right exactly. Yeah, So that way you you cook the various ingredients the right amount of time so that it's the right consistency, texture, nutritional value, all that kind of stuff. And I thought this was brilliant. I thought that their business plan really appealed to me because you could tell they got it.

They it was a very uh, innovative approach, not just hey, we'll sell them the equipment, more like, hey, we'll sell the equipment at a big discount, but will really make the money on the food part. And as long as the food is good and the robot does what it's

supposed to do, then that's a great business plan. So if you look at the images of what it actually the working model they brought to see, yes, what it looked like, and then you look at the mock ups of what they wanted to look like when it's an actual consumer product, it's miles apart. But that makes sense because it's a prototype versus what would be the finished product. Uh. But you know, they did launch an indie go go campaign, which they ended early. I think they ended it after

four days. Uh, And the reason they did was They said they got a lot of feedback that they thought was helpful and they wanted to incorporate in the design, but they didn't feel like continuing with the indie go go campaign would reflect that. So they ended in and said we're gonna come back in a few months with

a new design based upon the feedback we're receiving. Um. They also were talking about that it would be great in the future if the robot could do more than just you know, essentially it's just adding ingredients and stirring um. If it could do more than that, like do more of the prep work or or you know work, or maybe maybe even something a little more simple, like being able flip over an omelet or something. Because as opposed to just stirring um. So that was really interesting to me.

And like I said, I was really impressed by their their ingenuity, uh and really their business plan. It was beyond just the technology, which was already interesting, but the idea that they were like, well, convincing people to buy an expensive robot is kind of a no win approach, Like it's you know, unless you are just you know, determined to go after a very niche audience, you're not

really gonna make a lot of sales that way. But then we can look at a different one, a different approach that doesn't really concern itself too much with making affordable robots. Yeah. Yeah, let's let's say that that we are still or that Joe at the very least is still deeply unimpressed like this entire plan. Like he he needs something that's going to do way more work than

just stirring the food. And he says, you know those kids over at Sertainity, they're they're great and all, but I need I need a heavy duty robo chef, not just a cook. I need a chef. I want arms that operate on a rail above the stove encounter. Well, I have news for you, my friend, Moly Robotics. It's a London based company that created a robo chef. It's more advanced than the cookie concept. Cookie, by the way,

is the name of the robot from Serenity Kitchen. Uh so it actually incorporates learning algorithms, or at least the end product is supposed to, meaning that you can show the robot how to make something and then it will then be able to make it. You know, repeat that that process and make that thing for you in the future. Yeah, so I watched a demonstration video of this robot trying. I think it was making some crab bisk. I'm not positive, but that's the impression I got because they mentioned crab

bisk and the soup looked kind of bisky. It took a fresh crab and cracked it over the pot, crack into fresh crab exactly. Uh no, but it was. It was kind of like it was a pair of arms that are hooked to a ray all over the stove area and then yeah, moving back and forth, grabbing ingredients, pouring them into the pot, stirring them up, adding things. But but but how does it learn how to do

all of this? Well, the funny thing is it doesn't have any idea what the heck it's doing, so it doesn't, you know, when it grabs the olive oil and adds that to the pot. If you were to put a bottle of arsenic where the olive oil is, it would just add that all the same. It learns based on basically spatial memory from observing a human do the same actions, which means that you have to place the ingredients in the same spots as when you taught the robot how

to do this thing. Sure, sure, And and it could be slightly less catastrophic than arsenic its olive oil. It could be as vinegar that would make the taste of

the dish quite different. Y. Yeah, and also from the cooking pattern, Yes, the ingredients, the ingredients you would use, you might put in very special containers that are specific sizes and shapes, and that would allow the robot to know, all right, the thing that's in the round container that's three inches tall goes in next, then the squarish container that's four inches tall that gets at it after that.

Like it has it's like a program. It follows a specific set of steps, and you can show it what steps it has to follow. But you then have to set everything up exactly the same way so it can follow those steps. It can't just take raw ingredients that are piled in on the kitchen counter and then chop them up figure out what to do with them. Yeah. But but it's still pretty cool because once you show it how to create a recipe, it can it can remember that forever, and it can create that recipe without

any variation. Like it could be perfectly consistent, so you can see how something like this would be incredibly useful in a restaurant. And yeah, where your goal is to do it the same every time. Want you want the dishes to be as consistent as possible. You don't want there to be a lot of variation unless there's, you know, a request from a customer saying, you know, I'm allergic to such and such. Don't put that. Please replace my olive oil with yeah when you're you know that person.

Uh so the oh man, what a great kurdled biscuit. So one of the big challenges they had was creating, uh hands that would mimic the the utility of a human hand because they're pretty complex. That's still a robotics problem. Yeah, it's tough, and they did a pretty good job. They said that they had almost all the same degrees of

freedom of movement that a human hand has. They said, the really the only part of a human hand that they weren't they didn't replicate for the purposes of this robot was the ability to kind of not dislocate, but but to shift your thumb over and like they that one, they said, wasn't necessary for them to be able to hold onto the various implements, and they used the exact same type of kitchen utensils that we humans would use,

like a ladle or spoon or whatever. Uh. Those can be hung up and the robot can can recognize which ones are which and grab the appropriate one at any given point of the recipe. Um. They said, it was really tough. I'm sorry, I'm just imagining a scene in a movie where somebody has one of these in their house and they get murdered because somebody comes in and teaches the robot how to stay. Let's hope that that would be against its product, Like I would say, I'm sorry,

that's against my my law of cooks robotics division. Um. So it also can't send some of the more delicate processes that are involved in cooking things that have some

variability to them. And the example that they gave, which I thought was a very uh it was a great example, was if you want to beat eggs so that they start to peek, Yeah, egg whites, Like if you're trying to like you're trying to get to a meringue or something like that, and you're beating these egg whites, it doesn't Sometimes it takes a little longer than other times, Like it can depend upon the you know, whatever eggs

you've got at whatever time of year. Yeah, that the temperature of the bowl and of the eggs, and the humidity in the room. Yeah, So these these variables may be difficult for a robot to sense initially. So that would mean the robot would not necessarily have the the ability to predict how long it would take to get

to the right point. So for something like that, you would need to build in other elements for the robot to be able to sense when it needed to stop, like right, like um, like the resistance of the whisk going through. Yeah, or it may it may be as simple as some stereoscopic cameras that can get a good visual, uh idea of what's going on, or the resistance sensors. It might be a combination. Probably would be to try and increase the accuracy as much as possible, although peaks

are stiff. You have to you know, you have to balance the accuracy versus the cost that it adds to the overall device obviously. But yeah, that's one of those things where that would they hope to have that built into future versions of this. The BBC covered this robot Chef in a story and mentioned that it was being trained by Tim Anderson. It was a BBC Master Chef Champion in two thousand eleven. I want to be a cooking robot? Yeah, yeah, would you learn from Tim Anderson? Yeah?

I keep wanting to call him master Chief instead of master Chef. I see master Chef and I'm like, he's master Chief. Uh. This is the most halo centric cooking episode that has ever been recorded by anyone war war. So ideally you would end up getting this this very

consistent results. So it might not be the most exciting thing for a home chef, like a home cook, unless you just you know, as you know, there's this one dish that you love and you love you know how it's made every time, then obviously that would be desirable to you. But some people say, well it kind of takes the experimentation part out of cooking. Um, And so it really depends upon your approach to cooking in the

first place. Some people take a more out and brown kind of chemist approach and physics based approach, and some people are a little more we call them bakers. Some people are a little more loosey goosey. We call them me and uh, yeah, I am not. I don't bake well because I'm a little too loosey goosey with the rules and that does not work in baking. Do you not own a scale? I do own a scale, Actually

I don't use it. Some people were really bad at potions or chemistry, depending on which universe you live in, and uh and and and some you know, yeah, I was. I was. That was always my strong point. I am, in fact baker great in charms, but terrible in potions. Uh. So they want to develop this further. They want to make the finished consumer version smaller. It's a larger form factor than they would prefer right now to try and

put on a consumer market. And they also want to incorporate other things in the robot itself, like a ball refrigerator and a dishwasher, so would actually replace certain things in your home and therefore maybe justify the incredibly expensive price tag. So the BBC says the estimated price will be around ten thousand pounds or fifteen thousand, six hundred dollars US for the for the cheap version. The expensive version would be closer to dollars more expensive than the

Honeywell commutery. Yeah, I was about to say, we're getting right back into Honeywell territory. That's exciting. Yeah. So this would not necessarily be something your average home would would have uh incorporated into the kitchen. I mean, kitchen appliances are expensive. But I will start thinking about going to the bank and getting alone for this. If this thing can deveye shrimp and pitch cherries throwing, throwing a cherry pitter and an in, I feel your pain. I certainly would.

You know, for me, it's like the idea of cleaning fish. I can't do that, but I would buy a machine that could um. So one of the things we also wanted to mention was that, you know, robots are one thing, right, the automation of these tasks, that would free up a lot of time for us, so we could do something else. And for those of us who you know, we might enjoy cooking, but there's certain parts of cooking that we find tedious. We could give that over to the machines.

But what about going a step further and having artificial intelligence inform the types of foods we prepare in the first place. So there, you mean the capacity of a chef not to do the physical act of cooking, but to come up with recipes something vent dishes exactly, to innovate, not just to follow a set of instructions, but to come up with new instructions, perhaps combinations and instructions that have never before been attempted by humans and should be

some of which may fall into that out ofgory. So we when we can talk about it, Yeah, we're going to talk about chef Watson. Uh so Watson. Hey, we talked about Watson recently, so this would be the it's been a Watson kind of month, it has been. Yeah, Watson. It's funny. On forward thinking, I've been talking all about Watson and on tech stuff. I've been talking about the Manhattan Project, Manhatton project, and the post apocalyptic technology and radiocarbon dating. So I guess I just get on a

kind of a streak after a while. But with Watson, in case you don't remember, Watson's the computer developed by IBM. It played on Jeopardy and One against two returning champions because humans aren't smart I know who, I'm just kidding. They were very smart, but the computer had a very impressive performance. Yeah, and it's a it's a cognitive computer.

It learns UH and as as it is trained, it learns how to perform certain tasks, whether it's actual physical tasks, you know, if you have a robotic component, or just you know, the process of something better and better as it as it's as you train it and tell it, yes, you've done a good job. That's exactly what we want, or no, this is not the result we wanted, then it can start to learn and do them more and

more efficiently. So Watson has been used for all sorts of stuff we talked about in the Tone Analyzer episode. It's also been used to help with UH in the medical field to help lots of different processes and anything that you want to do that requires you to to bring a whole bunch of information to the table. It's it's really great for yeah, and it can it can end up kind of weighing that information and giving you at least an idea of what information seems to be

the most relevant. UH. And it's obviously making guesses in some cases, but they're very educated guesses based upon huge volumes of information. Well, Chef Watson is using that same technology, but in the process of creating recipes uh IBM calls it cognitive cooking, and it's based upon a couple of things, the historic uses of various ingredients as well as the chemical composition of those ingredients themselves and which chemical compositions

would be most likely to complement one another. So it is going to be learning in large part from recipes, from recipes that exist. It did. Yeah, they they fed it thirty five thousand recipes along with a whole lot of information like like food pairing theories and that that flavor compound chemistry and just cultural taste preferences. Right, So that way, with all that information combined, it could start coming up with really interesting recipes recipes. So they showed

this off. IBM showed this off in in the perfect way in my mind. They got a food truck and they sent it to south By Southwest Interactive, which makes perfect sense as a huge festival, a lot of a lot of influential people from various businesses are there, and um, what they did was they gave people the opportunity to vote on one of several different dishes that had been

invented by chef Watson. So Watson would go through its data base and say, all right, well, traditionally this ingredient could be paired with this other ingredient, but I'm going to do that and because I know that that's going to produce this one type of taste, that taste would probably go really well with this other thing that no one's ever really bothered to combine with these and that's

gonna be my recipe. So attendees would end up seeing the the candidates and then vote on Twitter essentially do a hashtag and their choice, and then whichever one got the most votes would be the one that the the food truck would deliver the next day, So you could go to the food truck and get a sample of that and try it out. Not to be clear, this food was not prepared by robots. No, no, what Watson was not in the food truck. No Watson and Spirit

was in the food. Yeah, the Watson technology remained back at IBM and was connected through the cloud. Uh. The humans were actually preparing the stuff, but they were preparing the recipes based off of an artificial intelligence creation. So this was innovated by a machine, not by a human humans. This is kind of like the opposite of what we were just talking about, right, So instead of the robot

preparing these ingredients and making a meal. The robot came up with which ingredients you were going to use, and then you created the meal. So this is the model where you become the robot and just perform out of blind faith, exactly what the machine tells you to do. Yeah, you become one of the drones in the nineteen eight for Macintosh commercial. But hey, you're a robot that gets to eat some potentially tasty and probably really weird food.

Let's talk about that. Well, all right, let's talk about some of the examples that they came up with that the food truck. So uh, they had stuffed like Belgian bacon putting. I don't know exactly what that was. The one that they gave the most attention to in the videos I watched was an apple cobb, Vietnamese apple cobb. That sounds pretty good to me. It was apples and pork, which have been used quite a few times like apple pork, apple sausages kind of stuff. And mushrooms were the other

key ingredient in this, along with some other ones. Um and the program had identified a common flavor compound and apples and pork and calculated that if the two combined that make a pleasant flavor and added the mushrooms in, and in fact, the people behind it said this was interesting. I never would have thought to add mushrooms to this particular dish, but people seemed to react to it positively. They also had other stuff like coconut caribbean snapper fish

and chips, which I'm down with great. They had a beef burrito that contained two ounces of dark chocolate, which I first reacted. Yeah. First, my first reaction was weird, and then I thought chicken. I put a tiny amount of dark chocolate into my chili recipe, which that makes sense. You know, I end up putting in an adult beverage in my chilly recipe, and I might surprise you. Because

I don't drink adult beverages. It often means that I am left over with quite a bit of adult beverage that you can get rid of because they don't sell it in the small amount I need. Not usually no. But anyway, if you wanted to give this a try, you don't have to wait for the food truck to show up in your neighborhood. Instead, you can actually go to the website, the Chef Watson website, and you can sign in using something like a Facebook profile or the

IBM I D and you then can experiment. So it has a place where you can put in an ingredient and you can put I think up to four ingredients, maybe more than that. I just I remember seeing four on the screen. And you can start with just putting in a single one and then I'll fill out the rest for you, or you can go in and fill in you know, no, I want these two paired together, and then tell me what I can make from that. And you can also fill in things that you don't

want to put in. For for example, I really shouldn't have bell peppers, so I could say no bell peppers, yep. Yeah. And in fact I did that as well, because I thought, hey, I might actually use this in the near future. But one of the people I'll be cooking for can't have tomatoes, so I have to eliminate tomatoes from that. Otherwise I would just have to go through recipe by recipe, you know,

and that gets t d s. Yeah, well yeah. IBM teamed up with Bonappetite to create this app, and they they've also published a cookbook of Watson's recipes with the Institute for Culinary Education, which is the team of chefs that they work together with to develop the software. In the beginning, recipe I want to try is called Broccoli Frecacy, which is pretty interesting to me, like it actually sounded

really appealing. It was also kind of odd because broccoli was the ingredient I put in at the beginning, so I was like, tell me the kind of stuff I can make with broccoli. It filled out the other ingredients. I think it added colligue. Well, first added tomato and its no, no, I can't have that. Knocked it off. They replaced tomato with cauliflower, and then I can't remember what the other two ingredients that it added before it just gave me the list of recipes. But it was

funny because it's it's called broccoli Frecacy. And then I looked at the the recipe itself and I was like, oh, this does sound really good. And then it occurred to me, hey,

I haven't seen broccoli yet. And it turned up that the broccoli was an optional ingredient in broccoli Frecacy, and instead of using noodles, which is how the regular recipe was being presented, it said you could replace the noodles by boiling broccoli and then mashing it up and then putting the rest of the dish on top of that. That would be a base. Okay, so optional broccoli broccoli frecacy. Yeah,

so freacacy, which may or may not have broccoli. So that's just one example of something odd that might happen. But that's not the strangest thing we discovered while using Chef Watson. No. I was like, well, I'll give this a spin. I am also the cook in our household, and I feel like I have fairly decent culinary instinks, so I decided to give it a try. I was disappointed to find that you can't start with whatever ingredients you want. They're they're limited by stuff the the you

know database whatever it is, already recognizes. So I tried to start with rat meat, and it just didn't know what to do with it. Apparently you're like, hey, what if I am living in a fallout vault and I have a limited group of ingredients. That's exactly when something like this would be really useful. All right, we'll go on. But okay, so no rat meat recipes. But then I thought, okay, maybe mustard greens. I like mustard greens. I'll see what

I can do with that. One of the top results was something called a mustard greens dumpling, like a Chinese style dumpling with wanton wrappers. Yeah, that sounded interesting to me. I was just like, okay, I'll give it a look. And I clicked on this recipe. And I promise I wasn't doing this to be mean. I wasn't trying to make Watson cry or intentionally display its shortcoming. But I

think the results were quite bizarre. So the first thing it tells you to do in the mustard greens dumpling is to fill the dumplings with a food processor minced combination of vegetables and seasonings. I quote, finally mince scotch, bonnet, pepper, and garlic. In food processor add okra and okra, Brian cured olives, Nisa olives, sesame oil, garlic, chili sauce, and soy sauce. Well, first of all, let me say, you

can never have too much okra. I like okra, but it I don't know what to do with the okra and okra. You have to finally mince it. It tells you at the beginning of the sentence okay to add in all the Okra. Uh yeah, well, okay, so I also like Okra a lot too, But even as a fan of Okra, this sounds kind of strange to me.

And maybe I'm just not being open minded enough, but based on my like human culinary instincts, a Chinese dumpling paste that is literally half by way made up of brine cured olives, nice Swa olives, and Scotch bonnet peppers sounds absolutely disgusting. Now you say that, and have you tried one yet? No, I haven't say that. For those who are not familiar with Scotch bonnet peppers, they they pack a bit of a punch. Yes, these are going to be hot. They're hotter than how many arrows they're Yeah,

they're quite spicy. Yes, these are gonna be very spicy. I mean I like spicy food. That's fine, But more than half of what makes up the filling is going to be olives. And then you're gonna add soy sauce to it, and chi sauce, which is I'll talk about an ingredient that didn't pop up. Oh yeah, wait a minute, I thought I was making mustard green dumplings. What happened

to the mustard greens. Well, finally I kept reading through it to find where they came in, and finally I got to the step pour enough water into the pot to reach depth of one half inch line steamer rack with mustard greens leaves. So, in other words, the steam is going to be passing through the mustard leaves, right. So well, I mean, so if you've ever made dumplings in a steamer, it's a very common practice to lay out cabbage leaves or let us leaves or something in

the steamer just to sit the dumplings on while they steam. Yeah, so they don't stick to it in the end, and those kind of things can impart a little bit of flavor to the dough. So the thing that it calls mustard green dumplings is is might have a waft of mustard green, but it has no mustard greens as an ingredient. Maybe what this tells us is that Watson really hates mustard greens. Could be I just wanted to be tangentially

related to the cooking process. Also, there's another thing that kind of surprised me, which is that it said this recipe makes thirty six surveys when they're they're about four cups of filling, it looks like an appetizer, clearly, Yeah, okay, And if I don't know, if the filling is mostly salty olives and so I sauce, that might be for the best. Anyway, I I don't mean to rag on

it too much. I mean, I think the idea of creating an AI chef is really cool, and I can actually see a recipe synthesizer being a better investment, at least in the short term than a physical robot cook, just because of all the problems of you know, how to navigate the kitchen and recognize ingredients and stuff if

you're talking about the physical cook. But to me, this shows the limitations of a system like this when it's trying to work with unstructured data, because there, I mean, I understand that the data that they fed it is I think somewhat structured, maybe partially structured, but it seems like it could be more well structured. So in other words, one of the limitations you would say is that it's listed as the principal ingredient, but in truth, the mustard

greens are just used to incidental to the recipe. But but the the AI can't tell that, right to the AI that because that's involved in the process, it must therefore be as as important as these other anything else

elements inside the recipe. Yeah, so, in my opinion, I would think to design like reliably good cooking instructions without a lot of human compensation, because we can look at recipes like these and say, okay, I could maybe take some of the suggestions of this recipe, but I mean not follow it word for word because that would be insane. And in fact, they even tell you to do that. They say, quote, these quantities and steps are ideas, but Chef Watson really needs you to use your own creativity

and judgment. Let us know how to make chef smarter. So they, I mean they understand the limitations obviously there. We're not like pointing out something they haven't figured out in this to point out cognitive computing. That's how cognitive computing works, right, is that you tell the computer, hey, I made this thing. You made It was a monstrosity and it it made me want to burn my house down. Don't do that. Then the computer says, got you, good,

but I'll not do it again. But I do think something like this could maybe work better if you start with more structured data. Well, personally, before we make such a bold statement as that, Joe, I think we really do have to make these and find out what happens. Yeah, okay, so you want me to make some olive dumplings and bring them in. I'll eat one if you bring it in. Well, I like Scotch bonnets. I'll bring the water, you bring

the water. Well, Yeah, it's too bad we don't have like a farmer's market near by the office, because I think that would be amazing. It would be we can shoot a video where we make Yeah, we make the Watson. We should each pick a Watson based recipe and do a video of it and say, here's the future of recipes. I think, do you have any day and dates coming up? Let's let's you know. I'm pretty much sold for the

rest of the year. But I'm okay, but I think I think it actually would benefit us from doing it. I think we need to do this, Okay, Yeah, I'm totally in. I mean because because this is really fun. It's such a fun demonstration of how a tool as powerful as Watson can be used in in perhaps unexpected ways. Uh,

and you know the application of Watson's processing power. The same application can also help us find more effective treatments for diseases, or identify drugs that could be therapeutic in ways other than what they were originally developed for right, or even find potential problems of different medications interfering with one another before you actually prescribe them to a patient.

So incredibly powerful tool. And you know, yes, this this application we're talking about seems a little frivolous, but honestly, I'm excited by it because I love the idea that the recipe for the next amazing dish might be created by an artificial intelligence because it doesn't know, it doesn't know that it's breaking a rule necessarily. Now I don't. I don't think the mustard green dumplings, what's gonna be it? Well, hey,

I want to end with some good news. Now. I did find another recipe under the mustard because it gives you lots of different recipes to choose from. I found another one that was called grilled mustard greens, and it was not for grilled mustard greens. It was actually for grilled cod served on a mustard green salad. But it sounded pretty good. I was like, well, maybe I will

give this a try cod with mustard greens. Now, the picture it had associated with it was a picture of grilled shrimp, and the first step in the cod recipe was one word. It said, d vane. I think, uh, I think what we're gonna need I don't think applies to God. I think at some point what we're gonna have to do is create our own Like this will

probably be how the singularity actually happens, y'all. What we will do is we will create a well, we'll cook a dish that was created by Chef Watson maybe if we were you know, the Serenity Kitchen folks are located all Atlanta. Maybe we'll use a robot to help prepare a dish that was made by a different robot, and then we'll take a picture of that and feed the picture through Google Deep Dream. And that's how the Singularity happens.

All right, I think we've got it planned. You know, So finally that April Fool's episode we released will become true. I'll just be a little there'll be a little prematures. All well, let we'll let you know when we're when we're pulling the trigger. Yeah, but no, I really do.

I really am excited about trying this, whether we do a video on it or not, I am excited about about using this and seeing how it turns out, because even if it fails, it's interesting, right and uh and I love again being being a gadget guy and being the cook. This is the kind of stuff that just appeals to me all on its own. But I'm curious to hear what our listeners think. Would you, guys, use a robot in your kitchen or do you think that that takes the fun out of cooking? Would you follow

a chef Watson recipe or have you? And if you have, let us know what the results were like, Um, shove Watson is a very easy app to you, So if you want to go out there and give it a shot, let's know your results. Please do. I would love to hear it more. Of course, if you have any suggestions for future topics, you can let us know. Send us an email. The address is f W thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Twitter, Google Plus or Facebook. At Twitter and Google Plus, we

are fw thinking at Facebook. Just search f W thinking in the search bar will pop right up you can leave us a message and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,