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All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

258 pointsby josefchentoday at 8:14 AM94 commentsview on HN

Comments

epsteingpttoday at 12:34 PM

The work is very interesting. The title is misleading.

A better title would be: "all of human ingredients compressed into 1,800 primitives"

There is little to substantively nothing about the actual cooking: preparation methods, proportions, etc.

But the idea that tomato goes well with beef the whole world over is very interesting and useful for creating flavors that will go together, perhaps surprisingly. It will be a nice resource in the future.

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leontrolskitoday at 12:10 PM

Neat.

I'm trying to compress recipes into little schematics https://leontrolski.github.io/recipes.html

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coldteatoday at 1:35 PM

>from 11 sources spanning seven languages, English, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian, German, and Indian-English

So hardly "all of human cooking"...

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BigTTYGothGFtoday at 5:12 PM

Looking at Table 2 I wonder why Chinese and Korean are similar enough to go in one huge bucket (1.5M) but Japanese is distinct enough to get it's own tiny bucket (33K).

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dhxtoday at 2:07 PM

See [1] for a demo, seemingly of an older iteration of what this paper describes. I was curious what ingredients the demo had selected (1032 available vs 1790 this paper selects) so I tried some obscure ingredients from "Organum: Nature, Texture, Intensity, Purity" by Peter Gilmore[2] (known for Quay restaurant in Sydney, Australia).

It's got some adventurous ingredients such as juniper berry, macadamia nut, nigella seed, orange blossom water and lemon verbena. It even separates sesame oil and toasted sesame oil. Even though the ingredients list only has "rice", "black rice", "brown rice" and "glutinous rice", when you select "rice" as an ingredient, the recipes it generates are smart enough to advise of chilling cooked jasmine rice before using in a fried rice, and smart enough to soak and rinse Basmati rice before using in a pilaf. If selecting "lamb" as an ingredient, the recipes it generates will choose the cut as shoulder or shank if you select vegetables normally associated with braising.

It doesn't know of grapeseed oil, orzo, mangosteen, lemon myrtle, and of course anything that only Peter Gilmore might use in a recipe and most chefs would have never heard of (karkalla as an example). I don't see this being too much of a limitation because such ingredients are quite localised or speciality. It knows of "pumpkin seeds" but not "pumpkin"--that is "squash", so there are some localisation improvements which could be made to improve British and American English use. I tried pairing "lamb" and "avocado" together in the hope it'd generate a recipe with a salad, but this failed. I then realised the ingredients list doesn't include lettuce or rocket, but has "salad greens" instead (American English) and no matter what I tried (other salad ingredients, chicken or no protein), it would not give me a salad. It kept generating wannabe-fancy dishes of a chunk of protein surrounded by tomato gel (agar agar) and a smear of avocado, or similar.

[1] https://epicure.kaikaku.ai/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gilmore_(chef)

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throwme_123today at 1:26 PM

I would not trust a model/corpus about food that includes English and German, but excludes Italian and French

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bhoustontoday at 1:42 PM

I saw this on X/Twitter. I do not believe that human cooking, and all of its techniques and ingredients and the various ways that things can be prepared in different cultural contexts can be compressed in to 2 megabytes.

It is sort of like saying here is a 1GB model that can do tool calling and coding and then you try it out and it barely functions. Yes, it technically is a 1GB coding model, but it isn't a good one.

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Retr0idtoday at 12:35 PM

> [Claude] performed all ingredient classification under deterministic decoding (temperature 0–0.1)

Not that it matters much in this context, but low-temperature is not the same thing as deterministic.

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haaztoday at 12:15 PM

Published by Kaikaku, a London based startup doing automated restaurants and cooking

21asdffdsa12today at 1:57 PM

I forgot this to raise it in the last food related thread - so here is the after-wit: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

The triangle of flour - milk and egg- held eggnog, but eggnog contains alcohol, which is made of starches, usually flour.. thus being percentage-wise closer to flour then displayed. Yes, so much on the spectrum..

NopIdoNtoday at 4:22 PM

I just want say a week's worth of human cooking compressed into a pellet

cuechantoday at 1:42 PM

I don't really understand, what the Graphs on page 9 and 13 represent, but they look somewhat like a world map with the continents. I wouldn't be surprised if there's actually a geographic connection. A lot of ingrediants are probably more prevalent in certain world regions.

sumenotoday at 4:54 PM

It makes me take the paper less seriously when one of the authors is submitting it with an inaccurate clickbait title.

selectedambienttoday at 4:14 PM

this seems more like the very tip of the iceberg here v a complete database, anyhow very neat

subscribedtoday at 2:28 PM

Clickbait title, post should be removed.

talktalkmaketoday at 3:01 PM

All of recorded human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

We've lost more than we know

prmphtoday at 3:39 PM

"All of human cooking" how?

Does it have African ingredients??

Clickbait

vitto_giodatoday at 1:22 PM

Why haven’t you analyzed Italian recipes in Italian?

mofferstoday at 1:47 PM

At uncook we’re in the middle of glamming up our ingredient normalization pipeline, so this is VERY welcome right now

antireztoday at 12:51 PM

Odd not including French and Italian recipes.

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nyokkitoday at 1:24 PM

As someone learning to cook from recipes in multiple languages, this is really cool. Curious how it handles the same ingredient called by different names (e.g., "scallion" vs "green onion" vs "long onion").

skinfaxitoday at 1:13 PM

Cooking/recipes seems like it would be an excellent application for a specialized model.

rcarmotoday at 2:30 PM

It’s soup, right? Has got to be soup.

zabzonktoday at 2:42 PM

WTF? I found this a parody. Perhaps because I've just been re-reading C.S. Lewis's "That Hideous Strength", where language becomes meaningless, I can't stand the design of the site or the text it presents.

Making a nice lentil soup doesn't require any thought or description. I know that I, and millions of cooks in Asia will do it with just their hands.

jonstewarttoday at 1:46 PM

Jacques Pepin's knuckles don't compress.

vrganjtoday at 1:37 PM

You can use it to browse flavor combinations here, seems quite neat!

https://epicure.kaikaku.ai/

That being said, I'm not excited about the idea of this being used to automate cooking somehow.

Food, to me, is part of what makes us human, where we express our soul for lack of a better word.

The idea of taking that away feels like robbing us of our humanity.

jweisbintoday at 12:52 PM

"human cooking"? ewww

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1970-01-01today at 1:01 PM

11 sources is not "all of" anything. You have a sample. The title is horrible. Fix the title please.

pfdietztoday at 12:48 PM

Cooking condensed beyond the point of usefulness.

It's another book for Zach Weinersmith.

suddenlybananastoday at 12:21 PM

I don't see why the title needs to be quite so grandiose.

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baalimagotoday at 1:25 PM

Great, so now chefs are being replaced too..!