Machine Learning Is Making Pesto Even More Delicious (technologyreview.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Machine learning has been used to create basil plants that are extra-delicious. While we sadly cannot report firsthand on the herb's taste, the effort reflects a broader trend that involves using data science and machine learning to improve agriculture. The researchers behind the AI-optimized basil used machine learning to determine the growing conditions that would maximize the concentration of the volatile compounds responsible for basil's flavor. The study appears in the journal PLOS One today.

The basil was grown in hydroponic units within modified shipping containers in Middleton, Massachusetts. Temperature, light, humidity, and other environmental factors inside the containers could be controlled automatically. The researchers tested the taste of the plants by looking for certain compounds using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. And they fed the resulting data into machine-learning algorithms developed at MIT and a company called Cognizant. The research showed, counterintuitively, that exposing plants to light 24 hours a day generated the best taste. The research group plans to study how the technology might improve the disease-fighting capabilities of plants as well as how different flora may respond to the effects of climate change.

Comments

sustainable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay so to "revolutionize farming" what percent of crops need to be grown indoors under artificial light and what is the financial and environmental cost of that? I support progress and things like geothermal greenhouses if they reduce energy used in shipping. If you put a greenhouse partially in ground and use an air intake buried underground you can grow things that would be otherwise shipped in. Even if you supplement the lighting a bit that might be a win but I don't see how this revolutionizes agriculture in a sustainable way.

https://www.usatoday.com/story...

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried 24 hour lighting before and it sucks ass. After a while, my plants started looking droopy like they're exhausted and needed sleep. They also don't grow very much at all when you give them non-stop sunlight. Growth seems to predominantly occur during dark hours, using energy that was stored up during daylight hours.

I got the best results by tweaking on/off cycles such that I had two effective days/nights during one 24 hour period. I could grow plants this way significantly faster than anything grown outside in the sun. Think of plants as little solar battery powered machines. They store up energy during the day and then spend that energy growing new tissue at night. Like batteries, there is only a limited capacity for storing so much energy at once, so it makes sense to create shorter artificial days/nights to speed up growth, especially for small young plants that have very limited storage capacity.

Basil that I grew indoors made huge leaves that tasted better to me than outdoor grown basil.

Strawberries grown indoors, unfortunately, taste like watered down crap. Apparently, strawberries need a lot more time and environmental stressors (UV, hot/cold cycling, water limiting, etc) to develop high quality tasting berries.

Strange tasting process

[sad_]

"The researchers tested the taste of the plants by looking for certain compounds using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry."

instead of really tasting it? it only should taste better theoretically, there aren't any real taste test results that confirm the actual taste is actually better (even though, this is a very subjective thing).