Joining the list of things that probably don't need improving by machine learning but people are going to try anyway is Belgian beer.
In a study led by Michiel Schreurs, a doctoral student at Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie in Flanders, the researchers wanted to help develop new alcoholic and non-alcoholic beer flavors with higher rates of consumer appreciation. The Belgian group documented 200 chemical properties from 250 commercial Belgian beers across 22 styles, such as Blond and Tripel beers. Using online beer review database RateBeer, they then linked 180,000 sensory descriptions to known chemical compositions. They also used profiling data from a trained tasting panel of 16 people.
"The flavor of beer is a complex mix of aroma compounds," Schreurs said."It is impossible to predict how good a beer is by measuring one or a few compounds. We really need the power of computers."