IBM's Super Computer Watson is working with a food truck as chef

IBM has started a food truck to sell food that's dreamed up by its famous Watson supercomputer. According to NPR, Watson is serving up dishes from a food truck as part of a new partnership with the Institute of Culinary Education in New York

The supercomputer made its debut as a chef at a Las Vegas tech conference last week, and so far has produced gourmet, fusion fare like a Swiss-Thai asparagus quiche, an Austrian chocolate burrito, and a pork belly moussaka.

In a process the company has termed "cognitive cooking," IBM has rendered food into mathematical terms so that Watson can interact with it. The system will use "algorithms to determine the precise chemical structure of food and why people like it, enabling it to suggest new combinations of ingredients that are both scientifically flavorful and surprising."

IBM says computational creativity could "radically transform" the food industry by "identifying new recipes and pairings that are not only tasty and healthy, but also efficient to produce."

Yesterday, IBM Research Vice President Mahmoud Naghshineh explained their thinking in a piece of  sponsored content(content provided by IBM) in Slate magazine.

"There’s no better place to explore computational creativity than cooking," wrote Naghshineh, who's based here. "Great food can seem so mysterious. We tend to think of it as a product of art, of intuition. Yet, in fact, there’s a massive amount of chemical and neural science that helps explain why one dish is sublime and another isn’t."

According to Business Insider, IBM research scientist Lav Varshney said that humans have trouble managing large data sets, such as the ingredients in a recipe. He says most professional chefs "can reason a pair of ingredients. Some of the best chefs can reason three ingredients. Pretty much no human can reason four ingredients."

And with the total number of possible combinations of raw ingredients approaching 1 quintillion, according to Mahmoud Naghshineh, IBM's VP of services research, it's easy to see that computers might play a natural role in creating the foods of the future.

IBM is sending the Watson food truck down to SXSW to keep hungry festival-goers sated, so if you're going, you'll actually be able to eat some of it. 

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