At ChefSteps, we are giving a lot of thought to the future of the recipe. We love the idea that the community could collaboratively develop recipes, and to branch, improve and evolve them over time.
In the process of working on one of our own rather hi-tech recipes lately, we developed an in-house tool that generates variations for us to test. We give it feedback on how we liked each variation, and it then creates a new set of variants for us to cook and evaluate. It uses a computer science technique called genetic algorithms to create those variations by breeding ("sex") and mutating ("gamma rays") the best recipes of the previous generation.
So here's where you come in! We thought it would be a hell of a lot of fun to combine the idea of collaborative recipe development with the Genetic Recipes tool on a more straightforward recipe and get you guys in on the game.
The tool itself isn't really ready for public use, so here's how it would work: you'd tell us you want a recipe (or more than one), and we send it to you as an email. You cook it, take an iphone photo, and give it a rating and some comments. Then if you want, we'll send you another one! As the results come in, the algorithm will get smarter and we should see better and better results.
So, two questions. One: If we build it, will you come? Do you want to be part of something totally new? Our thought would be to do it as next week's culinary challenge, but keep it open for a few weeks.
And two: if we do it, do you have a preference as to what kind of recipe it would be? It needs to be something that doesn't require technical tools or ingredients and has broad appeal. Two of our ideas are a cookie recipe, or a marinade for chicken. Which of those would you rather do, or do you have an even more awesome one we should consider?
