Taco
AI
Taco Bell recently introduced a new menu item called a "chalupa". The commercials for the chalupa say that it is "crunchy" and "irresistible", but they never really explain what a chalupa is. Is a chalupa more like a taco or a burrito? After pondering this important question, Ethan and I decided that a computer could give us the answer. We drove to the local Taco Bell armed with a digital camera and took a series of photographs of the contents of our value meal. We captured images of tacos and burritos of all sorts: beef, bean, and chicken, soft shell and hard shell. We then took a series of photographs of the mysterious new chalupa.
We trained the neural net on this battery
of sample images of tacos and burritos.Using the source images of tacos and burritos, we trained a neural net to distinguish between tacos and burritos. The neural net does this by establishing a weight for each pixel, summing the weighted differences across a test image, and comparing this sum to a threshold value. We found that after training our neural net with ten taco images and ten burrito images, it was able to distinguish between new pictures of tacos and burritos with almost perfect accuracy.
Next came the true challenge: the chalupa test. It turned out that the chalupa images were almost invariably identified as "tacos". After four hours of programming and ten dollars worth of Mexican food, we had our answer: the new chalupas at Taco Bell are more like tacos then burritos.
In this neural network sensitivity graph,
lighter colored areas represent pixels that
are most heavily weighted when
distinguishing between a taco and a burrito.Our research didn't stop there, however. I immediately thought of a new question: am I more like a taco or a burrito? I took a series of ten images of myself making various facial expressions and we passed them on to the neural net. Of these ten images, eight were identified as "burrito" and only two as "taco". Once again, the computer provided an answer: my composition is roughly 80 percent burrito and twenty percent taco.
