Re:Why Do Millennials Hate Groceries?
by zanny on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @01:20PM
(#12857126)
Sounds like a computer vision problem. The heuristics of judging the quality of most foods doesn't seem that prohibitive - coloration and geometric consistency puts you about 99% of the way there.
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Not everything is a computer problem. It's more of an economic issue. You can deliver hand-picked only premium goods but it will cost.
High quality food delivery is certainly possible. From what I've seen of Instacart delivering from Whole Foods, it works pretty well. But it's a premium service and isn't available where I live.
Additionally, the problem gets a lot more complex if you're doing something like buying produce slightly less than ripe for use in two or three days. That introduces a considerably larger spectrum of criteria across all available produce.
I'm not going to say it's necessarily more complicated of a problem -- I chose the word "complex" purposely -- as it mostly just simplifies down to being more training data for the AI produce picker (or what have you), but it sure seems like the failure rate would scale up rather quickly in real world scenarios. That would just lead to waste we wouldn't otherwise have.
Or maybe I just prefer to pick out my own produce. It could go either way, CV isn't my field.
Either way, handling pantry goods in this way doesn't sound particularly unreasonable.
Re:Why Do Millennials Hate Groceries?
by unclenoriega on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @01:27PM
(#12857218)
I'm sure if you build this system at a price cheaper than human labor and at least as good, people will buy it.