I was skeptical too, but all it takes is 60 bits, i.e. 60 "yes/no"-questions in their "black book". Doesn't sound too far-fetched. But, of course, I do hope they're not brute-forcing it.
The best way I could think of to generate lots of variables is a random forest classifier, which is an ensemble of (say) thousands of trees. Each tree constructs a lot of variables at each node, so maybe you'd have (stretching here) hundreds of thousands to perhaps millions of variables. But 1e6 << 1e18.
Maybe they're counting each pixel of some remote sensing image of orange groves? Bullshit again, that would have to be a 1e9 x 1e9 pixel image. I'd believe it from NGA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligenc...), but not from Coke.
If there's a shred of truth to it, they're using some dodgy mechanism to increase the variable count.
It seems more likely that the reporter made a mistake, and there are actually a quintillion possible internal states generated from a relatively small number of variables, not a quintillion variables.
BlackBook is a mixed-integer programming model implemented in OPL/CPLEX (used to be an ILOG product until IBM bought them).
So all this stuff about classifiers is off base. This isn't a predictive model -- it's a math program.
I don't know how they got that quintillion number. Could be that many "variations" instead. But the dimensions are things like time, varietals, locations, what you're gonna store/blend, that kind of thing. You end up with decision variables that are indexed in multiple dimensions and that creates the variable explosion they're alluding to.
CPLEX is awesome at handling huge amounts of decision variables so long as the problem stays mixed-integer, and that's what this is.
I wonder, doesn't everyone of the big corp's do this?
E.g. I remember an episode of some show like "how it's made" showing some big producer of pasta, where they have all this machinery to check and balance out the different qualities of incoming wheats (gluten content, minerals etc).
And I assume changes in wheat are not as noticeable as those between half-ripe and half-rotten oranges.
Without further details from Coke, I believe you are absolutely correct. Oranges do not have constant flavor throughout the year, and the various species of oranges which mature at different points in the season have quite different flavors. For example, in Florida, Valencia oranges rippen after decemeber for a few months, and are probably the most delicious orange you will eat. This supply of oranges is not enough to last the whole year, so most of these oranges are squeezed, pasteurized and stored for later use. The rest of the year, you might squeeze naval orange (kinda shitty orange), early-mids, or other oranges. Even worse, oranges have varying flavor throughout the season. When Valencias first come into season, most are half ripe, or half green. Maybe only for a few weeks out of the year will you get that perfect tasting orange. And god help you if those oranges are oragnic, and half of them are covered in mold.
Rather than sell you an orange juice with varying flavor throughout the year, or even throughout the season, it is much less wasteful and much higher yield to blend the oranges together to produce some rather fine tasting juice. All of the companies receive these blends (and essentially the same blends), the only difference between the companies is in what they do with these blends. Some choose to produce a less bitter juice, or sweeter, or more pulp. etc.
Anyways, it's not clear how their algorithm is different from this advertisement.
J.Lyons and Co.[0] were doing this in 1951. LEO[1], probably the first business computer, was built to collate data from Lyons Tea Houses to calculate how many cakes to bake overnight amongst other things.
is it really different than why people go to McDonalds or any other type of resturaunt? Because they expect a certain result which is why I can see Coke going to this extent. The just have many more variables to deal with than their soda products.
No idea, but I never recalled seeing any when I lived in California, nor on trips home to Oregon - although admittedly I'm mostly there in the summer, which isn't when they ripen.
I've seen blood oranges in Portland. In fact, there was a particular brand of clementines from Northern California that was amazing (I forget the name, but I would recognize the box again if I saw it). If you walk into a New Seasons during the right part of the year (maybe around April/May?) there's an entire section in produce devoted to citrus, more varieties/hyrids/etc of citrus than I knew existed before I lived there.
Blood oranges are indeed great, and no doubt fresh squeezed blood oranges are wonderful.
But I have (and still occasionally) live in Italy and have been very frustrated and annoyed with Italian OJ. I have to vehemently disagree with the notion that any kind of Italian OJ, at least as sold in grocery stores in Italy, is even remotely as good as the US kind. Italian OJ is high-temperature pasteurized, depulpified, put into tetrapak cartons, and radiated. It tastes like a mixture of the orange juice you get in plastic bottles in US vending machines, plus Tang. The blood orange version strongly brings to mind Minute Maid Fruit Punch. And it's expensive!
The US OJ industry makes stuff which is far from fresh-squeezed, but it is absolutely light years ahead of European variations in taste, and I think the reason is simple: Americans drink a ton of it. It is one of the very few foods in the US which Europe simply cannot approach.
You're drinking the wrong stuff, is all I can say. You've got to get the ones from the refrigerated section, not that crap that is sold at room temperature - that's no good.
And if you don't want it out of a box of any kind, you can get it fresh squeezed from many places. Nothing beats that.
> You're drinking the wrong stuff, is all I can say. You've got to get the ones from the refrigerated section, not that crap that is sold at room temperature - that's no good.
What else, in your opinion, makes that short list? Fried chicken comes to mind for me, although Korean fried chicken may have surpassed the traditional US creation.
The book I posted elsewhere points out the biggest thing: barbecue. They "grill stuff up" here in Italy, and it's quite good - especially a fiorentina steak - but it's not barbecue.
On the good side, you can get quite a wide variety of food in the US. Italy is very nationalistic about its food, and people, in general, are not as inclined to try new and different cuisines.
> They "grill stuff up" here in Italy, and it's quite good - especially a fiorentina steak - but it's not barbecue.
WELL.... the US makes great barbecue, but that's a unique cuisine. My experience in Italy is largely Emilia-Romagna, the breadbasket of Italy, and what they grill, out in the countryside, is nothing short of amazing. Grilled salami on piadina (a unique soft local flatbread), big slabs of grilled pancetta dripping with fat and salt, just unbelievable. I have had absolutely nothing approaching this in the US grill-wise.
So here's my list.
The US does better:
* Sandwiches (easily)
* Hearty soups
* Non-european, non-mediterranean international food (easily). Ethiopian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Indonesian, Cuban, Mexican (duh), Vietnamese, Persian, Afghanistani and Pakistani, all vastly superior in the US than in Italy, if you can even get it.
* Anything US Jewish Traditional
* Large-fish seafood in some cases: stuff you make steaks out of.
* Cookies (sorry Italy)
* Cereal
* Steaks, maybe, it's a tough call
Italy does better:
* Seafood except for a few big fish. No comparison.
* Most meat dishes of all kinds, except maybe steaks.
* Italian food (of course)
* German, Spanish, Greek, and Turkish food
* Salads
* Ice cream, without question
* Nearly all desserts
* By-the-pound deli-ish things
* Cheese and basically all milk products, no comparison
* Charcuterie (Salames, Sausages, pancettas, prosciuttos, etc.) So much superior to even the best stuff in the US that it's not even funny. Heck I'm married into a family which makes their own salame and prosciutto at a local farmhouse. This is not uncommon.
* Vegetables of almost all kinds. The only exceptions I can think of immediately are things that are unobtainable in Italy, like pecans.
* Organic products.
* The flour is more flexible. Italians have both soft (low-gluten) flour for pizza and piadinas etc., and a hard (high-gluten) flour for breads. It's very hard to get equivalent types or quality of flour in the US despite our huge wheat industry.
I'd give that one to Austria, of the places I've lived, actually. The US has some pastry type things that are not common in Italy, like muffins, but like many things there, many people put too much fat/sugar in them, icing on top, etc... which kind of wrecks things.
Another surprising one I'd give to Italy is hot chocolate - it's thick and creamy, not like the watery stuff you get elsewhere.
Well, I don't know if such divisions make sense in context of this discussion. In Italian, "gelato" refers generally to all ice-cream-consistency-frozen-desert-ish stuff, including for example sorbet (sorbetto). So my comparison was the whole US family versus the Italian family of frozen gelatinous ice-cream-like desert substances. Italy wins hands down, no contest.
"That stuff is infinitely better than the bland crap you guys have over there."
Ohh, don't stop. Tell us more sweeping generalizations about our entire country, with its thousands of different orange juice producers (all of which you've sampled) and its vastly different terrains, climates and farming practices that all lead to the same bland crap. What do you have to say of German Engineering? Belgian Chocolate? French Wine? Italian lovers? Asians are smart and the US is fat and the Russians are alcoholics, amirite!?
Anyways, thanks for chiming in on the entirety of OJ produced in the US.
The US has, historically, been very good at producing stuff that's good at being packaged up and sold anywhere in the country. Getting fresh fruit in Minnesota in the winter is a minor miracle of logistics.
However, the general quality of fruit and vegetables there has been inferior to that which I get in Italy. I think it's changing, and that things have improved a lot, but the US is still catching up.
I'm not the only one to see things this way - this book has a great section on why food is the way it is in the US:
Food in Italy is more likely to be good, but a bit less good looking on the supermarket shelves, or perhaps inconvenient. Some of those red orange varieties have lots of seeds, and aren't very big. Oranges in the US are large, last a long time on the shelves, don't have many seeds, look good, and tend towards blandness. In my experience.
it weirds me out that not a single place in the US you can get fresh juice (save from one or two chains of fresh juice only). Where i came from, at least orange and lemonade you can get at pretty much 100% of restaurants.
yet, every glass of water comes with a thick slice of lemon dangling on the rim of the glass. Go figure.
Was mostly referring to restaurants. place where you sit to eat down food. even places where you can get all-natural food you can't get a lemonade that is not from a box.
I used to by Italian blood orange juice (it came in those soft-pak boxes like Almond/Soy milk) in the Tops supermarket in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.. So some places must import it.
>Natural flavors and fragrances captured during squeezing are added back into the juice to restore flavor lost in processing.
A tiny mention at the end, but this is 90% of the show. Try this: buy a half gallon of from-concentrate orange juice and a bottle of orange extract. Put a tablespoon or so of the orange extract into the half gallon of orange juice, and shake it up. Now taste it, and tell me that "not from concentrate" has much to do with anything.
This is fascinating, I always thought I was a not-from-concentrate snob, now I know I've just been slightly misled all these years. OJ is pure sugar anyway, not something we should be drinking tons of.
This is an interesting description even if it probably isn't completely true. It's amusing that anyone would be disappointed to learn this. Orange juice is sugar water. I don't think anyone gets worked up about how Mountain Dew is produced.
There was a book written a while back about orange juice production called "Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice"[1]. The author did the talk-show circuit back then and you can find some articles and interviews here and there.
42 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 90.0 ms ] threadSee http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=log2%28one+quintillion%....
The best way I could think of to generate lots of variables is a random forest classifier, which is an ensemble of (say) thousands of trees. Each tree constructs a lot of variables at each node, so maybe you'd have (stretching here) hundreds of thousands to perhaps millions of variables. But 1e6 << 1e18.
Maybe they're counting each pixel of some remote sensing image of orange groves? Bullshit again, that would have to be a 1e9 x 1e9 pixel image. I'd believe it from NGA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligenc...), but not from Coke.
If there's a shred of truth to it, they're using some dodgy mechanism to increase the variable count.
So all this stuff about classifiers is off base. This isn't a predictive model -- it's a math program.
I don't know how they got that quintillion number. Could be that many "variations" instead. But the dimensions are things like time, varietals, locations, what you're gonna store/blend, that kind of thing. You end up with decision variables that are indexed in multiple dimensions and that creates the variable explosion they're alluding to.
CPLEX is awesome at handling huge amounts of decision variables so long as the problem stays mixed-integer, and that's what this is.
E.g. I remember an episode of some show like "how it's made" showing some big producer of pasta, where they have all this machinery to check and balance out the different qualities of incoming wheats (gluten content, minerals etc).
And I assume changes in wheat are not as noticeable as those between half-ripe and half-rotten oranges.
Rather than sell you an orange juice with varying flavor throughout the year, or even throughout the season, it is much less wasteful and much higher yield to blend the oranges together to produce some rather fine tasting juice. All of the companies receive these blends (and essentially the same blends), the only difference between the companies is in what they do with these blends. Some choose to produce a less bitter juice, or sweeter, or more pulp. etc.
Anyways, it's not clear how their algorithm is different from this advertisement.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Lyons_and_Co. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)
I guess for starters you'd need Sicilian red oranges in the US.
https://www.google.com/search?q=spremuta+di+arance+rosse&...
But I have (and still occasionally) live in Italy and have been very frustrated and annoyed with Italian OJ. I have to vehemently disagree with the notion that any kind of Italian OJ, at least as sold in grocery stores in Italy, is even remotely as good as the US kind. Italian OJ is high-temperature pasteurized, depulpified, put into tetrapak cartons, and radiated. It tastes like a mixture of the orange juice you get in plastic bottles in US vending machines, plus Tang. The blood orange version strongly brings to mind Minute Maid Fruit Punch. And it's expensive!
The US OJ industry makes stuff which is far from fresh-squeezed, but it is absolutely light years ahead of European variations in taste, and I think the reason is simple: Americans drink a ton of it. It is one of the very few foods in the US which Europe simply cannot approach.
And if you don't want it out of a box of any kind, you can get it fresh squeezed from many places. Nothing beats that.
Trust me. I've been there many times.
On the good side, you can get quite a wide variety of food in the US. Italy is very nationalistic about its food, and people, in general, are not as inclined to try new and different cuisines.
WELL.... the US makes great barbecue, but that's a unique cuisine. My experience in Italy is largely Emilia-Romagna, the breadbasket of Italy, and what they grill, out in the countryside, is nothing short of amazing. Grilled salami on piadina (a unique soft local flatbread), big slabs of grilled pancetta dripping with fat and salt, just unbelievable. I have had absolutely nothing approaching this in the US grill-wise.
So here's my list.
The US does better:
* Sandwiches (easily)
* Hearty soups
* Non-european, non-mediterranean international food (easily). Ethiopian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Indonesian, Cuban, Mexican (duh), Vietnamese, Persian, Afghanistani and Pakistani, all vastly superior in the US than in Italy, if you can even get it.
* Anything US Jewish Traditional
* Large-fish seafood in some cases: stuff you make steaks out of.
* Cookies (sorry Italy)
* Cereal
* Steaks, maybe, it's a tough call
Italy does better:
* Seafood except for a few big fish. No comparison.
* Most meat dishes of all kinds, except maybe steaks.
* Italian food (of course)
* German, Spanish, Greek, and Turkish food
* Salads
* Ice cream, without question
* Nearly all desserts
* By-the-pound deli-ish things
* Cheese and basically all milk products, no comparison
* Charcuterie (Salames, Sausages, pancettas, prosciuttos, etc.) So much superior to even the best stuff in the US that it's not even funny. Heck I'm married into a family which makes their own salame and prosciutto at a local farmhouse. This is not uncommon.
* Vegetables of almost all kinds. The only exceptions I can think of immediately are things that are unobtainable in Italy, like pecans.
* Organic products.
* The flour is more flexible. Italians have both soft (low-gluten) flour for pizza and piadinas etc., and a hard (high-gluten) flour for breads. It's very hard to get equivalent types or quality of flour in the US despite our huge wheat industry.
* Bread and pastries. No contest.
I'd give that one to Austria, of the places I've lived, actually. The US has some pastry type things that are not common in Italy, like muffins, but like many things there, many people put too much fat/sugar in them, icing on top, etc... which kind of wrecks things.
Another surprising one I'd give to Italy is hot chocolate - it's thick and creamy, not like the watery stuff you get elsewhere.
Pastries, sure. Bread, no.
(In my mind it breaks down to gelato, soft serve ice cream, and hard ice cream)
Ohh, don't stop. Tell us more sweeping generalizations about our entire country, with its thousands of different orange juice producers (all of which you've sampled) and its vastly different terrains, climates and farming practices that all lead to the same bland crap. What do you have to say of German Engineering? Belgian Chocolate? French Wine? Italian lovers? Asians are smart and the US is fat and the Russians are alcoholics, amirite!?
Anyways, thanks for chiming in on the entirety of OJ produced in the US.
However, the general quality of fruit and vegetables there has been inferior to that which I get in Italy. I think it's changing, and that things have improved a lot, but the US is still catching up.
I'm not the only one to see things this way - this book has a great section on why food is the way it is in the US:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GSYYQ2/?tag=dedasys-20
Food in Italy is more likely to be good, but a bit less good looking on the supermarket shelves, or perhaps inconvenient. Some of those red orange varieties have lots of seeds, and aren't very big. Oranges in the US are large, last a long time on the shelves, don't have many seeds, look good, and tend towards blandness. In my experience.
yet, every glass of water comes with a thick slice of lemon dangling on the rim of the glass. Go figure.
A tiny mention at the end, but this is 90% of the show. Try this: buy a half gallon of from-concentrate orange juice and a bottle of orange extract. Put a tablespoon or so of the orange extract into the half gallon of orange juice, and shake it up. Now taste it, and tell me that "not from concentrate" has much to do with anything.
[1]http://www.amazon.com/Squeezed-About-Orange-Agrarian-Studies...