Cooking with Chef Watson, I.B.M.'s Artificial-Intelligence App

The interface for Chef Watson, I.B.M.'s artificial-intelligence cooking app, is simple and welcoming, a minimalist canvas of four empty text fields and four dove-gray circles. You type in the ingredients, or let Chef Watson choose them for you according to its own mysterious logic: tomato, garlic, onion, purple seedless grape. These four ingredients, Watson declares, have a "synergy" of a hundred per cent--they are an unimprovable combination, chemically speaking. But, as an embodied being who has tasted those ingredients, you might be skeptical about combining them--especially when you scroll down to the suggested recipes and discover, near the top of the list, something called Purple Seedless Grape Starch Dish. The recipe also calls for "sixty-seven medium trimmed Easter-egg radishes," black beans, cinnamon, curly parsley, marjoram, and Calvados.