5 ms·
I worked for Google at the time they went through the cookie iterations in the cafes. Personally I disliked all the cookies that ever came out of this project,
by meinstream 8y ago
I worked for Google at the time they went through the cookie iterations in the cafes. Personally I disliked all the cookies that ever came out of this project, mainly because they contained spices, I heard the same thing from many others.
After you got handed a cookie you were asked to fill out a feedback form on a tablet, which almost always is annoying.
But more importantly, the process of optimizing the ingredients left out many parts of what makes food enjoyable, temperature and texture for example.
I know this was meant to be a fun showcase of ML but to me this is still my favourite example of explaining misuse of ML technology where a simpler statistical model supported by expert opinion would have outperformed the taste of the cookies. Eg, any cookie expert might know that the number of people who like spicy cookies is only a small subset of all cookie lovers.
- joshuamorton 8y agoIf I recall, the spices were an intentional choice of a kind of pathological input to the optimizer, and iirc it did what you might expect (minimize the amount of cayenne to the smallest in the acceptable range).
- shmageggy 8y agoSounds like you got the less tasty side of the explore/exploit tradeoff.
- oh-kumudo 8y agoI think this is exactly the case how ML could go wrong. I would assume the people who hate the cookies probably will not bother to submit a survey and try again. The sample might be biased and not representative of the general population, thus overfitting, performs badly on a boarder test set.
- whazor 8y agoOur dystopian future where we will be forced fed cookies in order for accurate optimization.
- archgoon 8y agoThere was an icecream advertisment with that as a theme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4IFNKYmLa8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4IFNKYmLa8
- antidesitter 8y agoThat already happens :-)
- Corence 8y agoI've heard this was a problem since the spice level was optimized in an office where they make the cookie dough the day of service, but deployed in an office where they make the dough the night before and cook on demand. The spices in the dough longer made the flavor stronger than it was optimized for. A good example of training/serving skew.
- sizzle 8y agoI wonder if there was an ethnic bias at play with the population that participated since spice level tolerance is higher in Asian countries. https://diversity.google/annual-report/ https://diversity.google/annual-report/