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Based on the title, I was expecting an equally nerdy take on incremental improvements to the classic cookie recipe, along the lines of this great article by Ken
by kepano 7y ago
Based on the title, I was expecting an equally nerdy take on incremental improvements to the classic cookie recipe, along the lines of this great article by Kenji Lopez-Alt: https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best-chocolate-chip-cookies.html https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best...
- gwern 7y agoI was rooting for an update on Google Brain's Gaussian process-designed chocolate chip cookies. Alas! It is some HTTP thing I personally don't care about. :(
- RandomBacon 7y agoSame here, I was excited to open up the link in case it was, and disapointed when I saw it was about digital cookies. Oh well. Perhaps you should submit the link you mentioned tomorrow, I will upvote it if I see it.
- justwalt 7y agoMe too, and I was looking forward to it. When I have time, I want to experiment with doing a sort of gradient descent on an array of different cookie recipes to find the best ratios of ingredients. That would be an interesting project.
- burfog 7y agoYou would have to constrain your experiment to some definition of "cookie" to prevent it from converging on a "cookie" that is pure dark chocolate.
- Qwertystop 7y agoYou'd have to get there through gradient descent, though. A pile of dark-chocolate chips is quite good, but a "cookie" that is a pile of chips baked with a small but nonzero amount of butter, flour, and baking soda... isn't. Gradient descent would have trouble with getting you through that, because cutting out the baking only makes it worse, and cutting out the other ingredients without cutting out the baking _also_ only makes it worse, and reducing the amounts of everything that isn't chocolate without bringing them to zero _still_ only makes it worse.
- justwalt 7y agoInstead of gradient descent, I should have said the shotgun method. I imagine giving out a few cookies of varying quantities of ingredients to neighbors and then choosing the best. Though, this method does lead to potential local maxima.
- avs733 7y agoIn case anyone isn't familiar with these cookies...they are ridiculously good cookies. They are useful for impressing people but they are dangerous. If you give them to people they will expect more. You will forever be the chocolate chip cookie person.
- RandomBacon 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282246