[HN Gopher] Computerized Cooking (1985)
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       Computerized Cooking (1985)
        
       Author : Tomte
       Score  : 32 points
       Date   : 2022-07-13 09:36 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (diyhpl.us)
 (TXT) w3m dump (diyhpl.us)
        
       | don-code wrote:
       | While not cooking, per se, Grocy (https://grocy.info/) is able to
       | store recipes organized by ingredients, and do interesting things
       | like tell you what you can cook without running to the store.
        
         | rockostrich wrote:
         | I haven't gotten this far yet with my Notion, but I'm fairly
         | certain it can do this as well (and I assume Coda could also do
         | it).
        
       | selfhoster11 wrote:
       | This seems to be referencing Cocina, an application for
       | Macintosh, but I wasn't able to find any references online. Is
       | there any more information about this software?
        
       | FunnyBadger wrote:
       | You can say the same thing about law and how 50% of it operates -
       | just a computer program missing a language to represent it.
       | Except it's more complicated than that.
        
       | nyx wrote:
       | I've given this problem a lot of thought, particularly the notion
       | of cataloging recipes in some machine-parseable format and using
       | them to either generate shopping lists or suggest meals based on
       | pantry contents.
       | 
       | I think it's a non-trivial problem. Even with a relatively
       | limited set of go-to dishes and ingredients, it seems to me like
       | the data entry alone would be a herculean effort: making sure
       | everything is normalized, operations like chop vs. mince vs. dice
       | are standardized, etc. Currently, I'm relying on my fragile meat
       | brain and a folder full of text files, skimming a directory
       | listing of the folder for inspiration, and using individual
       | recipes to build shopping lists.
       | 
       | I totally agree with the premise of the original article, that
       | you can reduce recipes to trees and describe them with a formal
       | language, but once I take off my computer scientist hat and look
       | at this behavior critically, it seems horrifically asinine.
       | 
       | Anyone have a better solution? I know there are a couple of open
       | ones out there, and I'm sure some of you nerds have homegrown
       | something way more sophisticated. I've also got a hunch that this
       | would be a great problem to throw language models at...
        
       | ComputerCat wrote:
       | Well, I'll never look at a recipe the same way again...
        
       | kleer001 wrote:
       | Lovely, beautiful, what a wonder.
       | 
       | That said I've been leaning towards a jazzier and improvised kind
       | of cookery. But now I know where to look if I want to logically
       | encode it.
       | 
       | For example, if anyone cares, I've recently added the pasta-
       | beans-cheese meta recipe to my repertoire after seeing it played
       | out a few times in different guises. I think this where the real
       | power lies, generalizing, right?
        
       | rexreed wrote:
       | This approach to standardizing recipe formats was done with XML a
       | few decades ago as well: http://www.formatdata.com/recipeml/
        
       | chromaton wrote:
       | I've always missed having an equipment list in recipes in
       | addition to ingredients.
       | 
       | I think the tree idea is good, as it shows what steps can be done
       | in parallel. It would also be helpful to show how long each
       | subtree is expected to take with working time and waiting time.
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-14 23:01 UTC)