4 ms·

As someone who can't stand the taste of them I'm still enthralled by the prospect of collecting mushrooms for fun and their culinary value. The trouble I run i

As someone who can't stand the taste of them I'm still enthralled by the prospect of collecting mushrooms for fun and their culinary value. The trouble I run into is how I have no idea what's good to eat, what'll make you sick, what'll get you high, and what'll just simply kill you. Guidebooks are worse than useless, because you can never be sure that the slight differences between the mushroom you're looking at and your best guess in the guidebook are unimportant or a distinction that means the one you picked is fatal instead of edible. There's no app for this. [EDIT: Ok, there are apps for this, but there's always room for improvement] There should be. And this guy could earn a modest income helping some semi-talented ML and mobile engineers in Washington build one with his wealth of knowledge. Take a picture of a mushroom with your phone, and it'll help you tell what you can expect from it. Nothing helps with legal or medical problems like not having to worry about relatively tiny amounts of money.

opportune 9y ago
Imagine the liability concerns. Only takes a few false positives... Probably much smarter is a general ML based app that allows user-defined, crowdsourced datasets. So for example, you download the app, and you pay to train a model using datasets that other people gathered. This could be used for things such as middle school science experiments (what is ML? what are the differences between cloud and rock types?) to things like magic mushroom identification. Since the models and datasets are user-curated, you're less exposed to liability, since you merely provide the platform
corndoge 9y ago
No possible way a smartphone camera and a classifier could identify two extremely similar mushrooms better than a human expert
- Retric 9y ago
  You don't need to identify them, you need to rule out the unsafe possibility's and can reject anything that's at all risky without significant downside. However, these kind of vary narrow tests are actually fairly easy for ML.
- bfuller 9y ago
  no but it can help. generally yellow cap psilocybes have one lookalike you will run into and the way you dofferentiate the two is the color of spores so a picture wouldn't quite cut it. But the app could still offer that information even if it couldnt accurately decipher the two. The lookalike isn't poisonous anyway.
gus_massa 9y ago
There was a recent post: "Show HN: Identify mushrooms from pictures (champignouf.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14840678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14840678 (37 points, 25 days ago, 50 comments)
michalskop 9y ago
There are apps - e.g., "Mushrooms app" for Android. It is probably targeted mainly on (central/eastern) Europe, it is the region where mushrooms picking is pretty common. There are a few others, too.
camillescott 9y ago
There are many mimic species which can only be distinguished with a spore print -- cubensis has one that's highly toxic. Presumably this confers an evolutionary advantage (spore spreading by critters going for the fun ones), making ML based on visual identification a very bad idea.
pvaldes 9y ago
The legal risks of an app like that would be huge. Identify mushroms for a picture can be really tricky and I wouldn't advise it.
chippy 9y ago
>Guidebooks are worse than useless You need a better guidebook, and spend time with it. As with plants or any taxonomy there are rules and things to do that can classify things. It's more than just a photo of the thing that its about. You need to spend time to learn, as you would learn a programming language, the rules for classification. It takes time and some effort to learn how to know whats good to eat, what makes you sick and what'll get you high. Essentially it's a form of biological inquiry so treat it like a science. Almost every mycologist uses a few books and tools to identify their haul. edits: rule of thumb for eating: The range of edible but not eatable / awful mushrooms is huge. The range of deadly mushrooms is small. The range of edible and delicious mushrooms is small too. The bad and good ranges don't overlap on the whole. Thus, like with identifying garden plants you only need to learn a few kinds to be able to hunt the lovely edible mushrooms. But you do still need to learn and spend time in the learning.

opportune 9y ago

Imagine the liability concerns. Only takes a few false positives... Probably much smarter is a general ML based app that allows user-defined, crowdsourced datasets. So for example, you download the app, and you pay to train a model using datasets that other people gathered. This could be used for things such as middle school science experiments (what is ML? what are the differences between cloud and rock types?) to things like magic mushroom identification. Since the models and datasets are user-curated, you're less exposed to liability, since you merely provide the platform

corndoge 9y ago

No possible way a smartphone camera and a classifier could identify two extremely similar mushrooms better than a human expert

Retric 9y ago
You don't need to identify them, you need to rule out the unsafe possibility's and can reject anything that's at all risky without significant downside. However, these kind of vary narrow tests are actually fairly easy for ML.
bfuller 9y ago
no but it can help. generally yellow cap psilocybes have one lookalike you will run into and the way you dofferentiate the two is the color of spores so a picture wouldn't quite cut it. But the app could still offer that information even if it couldnt accurately decipher the two. The lookalike isn't poisonous anyway.

gus_massa 9y ago

There was a recent post: "Show HN: Identify mushrooms from pictures (champignouf.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14840678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14840678 (37 points, 25 days ago, 50 comments)

michalskop 9y ago

There are apps - e.g., "Mushrooms app" for Android. It is probably targeted mainly on (central/eastern) Europe, it is the region where mushrooms picking is pretty common. There are a few others, too.

camillescott 9y ago

There are many mimic species which can only be distinguished with a spore print -- cubensis has one that's highly toxic. Presumably this confers an evolutionary advantage (spore spreading by critters going for the fun ones), making ML based on visual identification a very bad idea.

pvaldes 9y ago

The legal risks of an app like that would be huge. Identify mushroms for a picture can be really tricky and I wouldn't advise it.

chippy 9y ago

>Guidebooks are worse than useless You need a better guidebook, and spend time with it. As with plants or any taxonomy there are rules and things to do that can classify things. It's more than just a photo of the thing that its about. You need to spend time to learn, as you would learn a programming language, the rules for classification. It takes time and some effort to learn how to know whats good to eat, what makes you sick and what'll get you high. Essentially it's a form of biological inquiry so treat it like a science. Almost every mycologist uses a few books and tools to identify their haul. edits: rule of thumb for eating: The range of edible but not eatable / awful mushrooms is huge. The range of deadly mushrooms is small. The range of edible and delicious mushrooms is small too. The bad and good ranges don't overlap on the whole. Thus, like with identifying garden plants you only need to learn a few kinds to be able to hunt the lovely edible mushrooms. But you do still need to learn and spend time in the learning.