How IBM’s Watson Will Make Your Meals Tastier

food, data, flavour pairing, hedonic psychophysics, food chemistry, open sauces, IBM, Bon Appetit

This week, Bon Appetit and IBM are releasing the beta version of a new app called Chef Watson with Bon Appetit that will help home chefs think up new and inspiring ways to use ingredients. Think of Watson as an algorithmically inclined sous chef that gently suggests hundreds of flavor combinations that you’d probably never come up with on your own. To do this, Watson crawled a database of 9,000 Bon Appetit recipes looking for insights and patterns about how ingredients pair together, what style of food it is and how each food is prepared in an actual dish. When the computer combines this information with its already robust understanding of food chemistry and hedonic psychophysics (the psychology of what people find pleasant and unpleasant), you get a very smart kitchen assistant.

http://www.wired.com/2014/06/how-ibms-watson-will-make-your-meals-tastier/