| ▲ | Razengan 2 days ago | |||||||
If you just want a histogram of all the chemicals that are present, that would probably be doable if not already done. But how would you even quantify/qualify the "sensations" of those senses? Vision is "easy": What I see is what you see is what the machine sees. A machine shows us what it sees and we can verify that it is working correctly, with a glance. How would we verify that a machine smells or tastes "correctly"? | ||||||||
| ▲ | Terr_ 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||
> a histogram of all the chemicals that are present, that would probably be doable if not already done. I'm no olfactory biochemist, but that sounds like science-fiction to me. The, er, reference implementation we're talking about is advanced nanotechnology we don't fully understand. While we can do stuff like mass-spectrography, that involves destroying complex chemicals and converting them to smaller fragments we can tally, and then guessing at possible configurations they might have originally had. If someone had a device that could simply tell you the exact chemical formulas of all molecules of any kind in a sample, it would be used everywhere and they would be very rich. | ||||||||
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| ▲ | luz666 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
The machine smells correctly, when the same numbers (or similar when using some norm, e.g. the L2) appear for the same smell (reproducibility) and therefore a mapping (numbers -> smell) can be created. When this starts to exist (practically usable), there can be a database to store the mappings, allowing classification. E.g., the machine says "this tastes like banana". The machines/algorithms/products could itself be rated for precision. I dont say such machines don't exist, but for my taste (pun intended) the solutions all lack something, either long term stability or having a second source supplier or being able to classify a reasonable amount of tastes or being able to distinguish between two tastes (or lacking all those things together). | ||||||||
| ▲ | sschueller 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
The machine would need to reproduce the smell just like it reproduces what it sees on a screen. What the sensor "sees" isn't what our eye sees either. | ||||||||
| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||
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