Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dogcomplex 731 days ago
I mean... does anyone think that an LLM-assisted program to trial and error cheesecake recipes to a panel of judges wouldn't result in the best cheesecake of all time..?

The baking part is robotics, which is less fair but kinda doable already.

1 comments

> I mean... does anyone think that an LLM-assisted program to trial and error cheesecake recipes to a panel of judges wouldn't result in the best cheesecake of all time..?

Yes, because different people like different cheesecakes. “The best cheesecake of all time” is ill-defined to begin with; it is extremely unlikely that 100 people will all agree that one cheesecake recipe is the best they’ve ever tasted. Some people like a softer cheesecake, some firmer, some more acidic, some creamier.

Setting that problem aside—assuming there exists an objective best cheesecake, which is of course an absurd assumption—the field of experimental design is about a century old and will do a better job than an LLM at honing in on that best cheesecake.

What would be interesting, is a system that makes some measurement of a person (eg analyse a video of them eating different cheesecakes or talking about their tastes or whatever), and bakes the best cheesecake specifically for them.

Then you can get a panel of 100 people and bake 100 cheesecakes for them.

And you really think an LLM-assisted program that follows experimental design principles wouldn't be able to find the best cheesecake per each judge's tastes and map and optimize the overall heuristic space of cheesecakes to find the best of the group according to multiple metrics..?
Not any better than, say, an ELIZA-assisted program that follows experimental design principles. At that point the LLM is superfluous.