How A.I. Engineered the Most Delicious, Efficient Basil Ever
Caleb Harper and Risto Miikkulainen were on a mission to grow basil: lots of it, fast, in an industrial environment—and without compromising the herb’s sweet-but-savory flavor.
So they did. The two scientists—Harper is a research scientist at MIT’s Media Lab, Miikkulainen is a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin—and their team hauled a bunch of shipping containers into a warehouse in Middleton, Massachusetts. They fitted the containers with automated lights, air conditioners, and plumbing, then hooked them up to a computer control system running sophisticated A.I. algorithms that the team wrote.
In April, Harper and Miikkulainen published the results of their experiment in PLOS One, chronicling how they used A.I. to make what could be the world’s first, smartest batch of basil.