Chef Watson: Computational Creativity Applied To Recipes

Can computers be creative? Meet Chef Watson. Aimed at adventurous cooks, Chef Watson is a cognitive computing application revolutionizing how people combine ingredients to create unique dishes with novel flavors. Compared to artifacts in expressive or performance domains, work products resulting from scientific creativity (including culinary recipes) seem much more conducive to data-driven assessment. One can apply computationally intensive techniques to generate many possible combinations and use automated assessors to evaluate each of them. Assembly work plans for the selected novel products can subsequently be inferred from existing records. Chef Watson applies this approach to the culinary world. After gathering data and creating a knowledge base of recipes, ingredients, and flavor compounds, the system generates ingredient combinations that satisfy user inputs such as the choice of a key ingredient, desired dish, and dietary constraints. Once a combination has been selected with the help of novelty and quality evaluators, the system further generates ingredient proportions and recipe steps. Using several variations of this approach, the system can generate new wildly creative recipes, or merely adapt existing recipes to personal preferences.