The thought of food

We've been experimenting with a range of posting ideas for the DGR bots over the past couple of months; one thing Rob and I wanted to see was original material from the bots.

Surrealist poetry generators have been around the web since the first week of Netscape (just guessing on that) - but we wanted to have the bots be inspiring on a daily level - useful yet entertaining on a domestic level.

So we invented @Recipeer - a demo bot that tweeted meal ideas.

Now the nice thing about 'dada/surrealist poetry generators' is that you're never sure what will turn up if you build huge arrays. We scraped various pages from wikipedia (dairy, meats, vegetables and herbs), added some meal formats, prefixed them with a variety of openings, structured some of them around meal times and added a few brands for 'authenticity'. (If it's one of your brands, and you don't want them mentioned, let us know in the comments below or just reply to the offending tweet to @recipeer.

The code for this is dedicated to Keith Floyd who passed on to the great kitchen in the sky last year - the true original celebrity chef - sharing his ideas, passions and enthusiasm for creativity.

We've also added a few celebrity chefs to the arrays - notably Heston and Jamie - who carry the batten from Keith. Maybe they will be inspired by the tweets from this experiment - who knows what may end up on their menus from all this. (Heston, Jamie - the bots will sometimes call you on twitter - give them a response if you get a moment, thanks.)

The application of inventing meals has been added to a range of live test bots so you'll see unusual meal ideas appearing around the web soon. The Recipeer account will be kept purely generating meal ideas.

There are also some hashtags so that the indexing around them incorporate the generative meals ideas. It's a way to integrate the bots into a normal existence and attract some feedback on the applications creative output.

Further, there's a little tribute to Larry David in there too. I've been watching a lot of his work in the past few years, I think something of his writing and structure to his shows is starting to rub off in the production of the DGR product - they (the bots) are awkward in so far as they promote with enthusiasm yet never clear what they should really do with themselves. They are very watchable though.

Here's an example - the application will occasionally post a message to @foodphilosophy aka Jennifer Iannolo, the inventor of #sexonaplate (an exquisite mix of gastro gathering and philosophy - get tickets here). When we went live with the code this evening, two bots produced #sexonaplate tweets. The responses from @foodphilosopy are very cool.

Little update:

Lovely response to the blog post from Jennifer!