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All right, we’re trying to show the user what they can make from what they got in the bar. Cool.

We know what they got in the bar (see previous post); now, we better show them some useful cocktail recipes, or they’ll sue the hell out of poor me for false advertising :-). And hey, I gotta pay for hosting, no dollars to waste on legal fees, sorry.

[Side note: cocktailbuilder.com is currently hosted on my home server, an ancient Linux box – PIII 500MHz. 40KB/s upload rate. $ 30/month for cable internet with Millennium Digital Media – btw, wonderful ISP.]

All right, jokes aside. We need some alcohol here.

I (my second self), the semi drunk college student Jane, am holding a party. I go to San Jose State, so I managed to sneak out some lemons out of my auntie’s back yard, so these lemons end up on my ingredient list. Now back to cb, the poor site owner that’s about to be sued; he’s thinking whether to show 1940s blue blazer, a cocktail that involves lemon peel, to our tipsy Jane. One more piece of data: CB doesn’t know that Jane is so drunk that she wouldn’t be able to peel the lemon without converting the lemon into lemon juice.

So: do we show a cocktail that has lemon peel to a user that has lemons in the ingredient list?

Before you answer, let me ask you a different question. A cocktail called Purple Passion calls for Absolut vodka, but the user has Stoli. Do we show the cocktail?

Another one: a cocktail calls for a raspberry vodka, but the user has an orange-flavored vodka. Do we show the cocktail? What if the user has just “vodka”, and they didn’t specify the type of vodka they have?

Yeah. It gets complicated, doesn’t it.

For the first two questions (lemon peel vs lemon, Absolut vs Stoli), I’m guessing you answered “yes”, show the cocktail, let ‘em have some booze. For the last one (raspberry vodka vs orange vodka), you probably said “no, it will taste different”.

Crap. And I had such a good theory here. Now I’m totally gonna get sued, cause I don’t know how to build this 🙂

Fine-fine, no more theatre, let’s talk about solutions.

Option 1: Define “homogeneous groups”: all cocktails that contain any light rum will show up if the user has any other light rum. That is, all members of the group are considered “synonyms” for cocktail-making purposes.

Option 2: Define a hierarchy of ingredients that looks something like the following:

If we let the user enter any one of the LEAF nodes as one of their ingredients (i.e. Stoli Orange, but not Orange Vodka), cocktail matches will become relatively simple. If a user holds a particular node, show all cocktails that include that node’s siblings or ancestors. For example, if the user has Stoli Orange, we’ll show recipes that include the following highlighted nodes:

However, this may become a bit constraining:

1) Users can’t just type in that they have some vodka in the bar. They gotta say exactly what kind it is. Make users suffer (i.e. stand up from their computer), and they will leave.
2) What do you do with recipes that call for stuff that doesn’t quite fit in one category, for example, what if a recipe says “use raspberry or orange vodka” (bear with me, I can’t imagine what the consequences of this substitution would be)? Our hierarchy would then have to become sort-of unclean, involving “virtual” nodes; these virtual nodes break the lovely tree structure, converting the whole thing into a directed graph:

Uhh, decisions, decisions… What’s your take?
cb

Cocktail Builder: JavaScript Alcoholic

Some time ago, I wrote how freaking cool the auto-complete system is for ingredient entry. If you don’t believe me, go take a look at its implementation – I actually have it done. For the lazy ones – folks like me – it ended up looking something like this:

Sexy, huh?

Yea, whatever. I know what you’re gonna say – I’ve seen this a billion times.

You have, you’re right. But one thing you most likely never thought about when you used a similar sexy-auto-complete textbox: which matches show up?

Obviously, you want to show ingredient names that have the stuff that the user typed in as a substring. So, user types “vo”, you show “vodka” and “absolute vodka”. But you don’t want to show “Cuervo tequila”, do you? So, rule #1: only show stuff that has user’s substring as the beginning of the word.

Now, the more interesting question: how do you want the suggestions ordered? Few options here:

Alphabetically. Simple to implement, easy to understand, cool. One problem: if there are 50 items that match (as there are with the substring “vo”), your auto-complete text box is not really useful.
Depending on how frequently the item is used in cocktails. This is a pretty good measure of popularity; if there’s 100 cocktails that use orange juice, it’s probably because lots of people have orange juice in their bars, so you can infer that orange juice should show up before Stoli Orange for the query “ora”. However, this has drawbacks: what if your cocktail database is skewed?
Depending on the number of previous users of the system that have added this ingredient. This means that the system is getting smarter and smarter as the number of its users increases; this is definitely a good thing. Drawback: chicken-and-egg problem, you need initial users to make the system smart, and those initial users will suffer.

So far, I went with approach 2 – just because the site doesn’t have too many users yet (do let your friends know about it if you like it!), but I instrumented the tools necessary to know what ingredients users are adding, so I’ll switch to 3 at some point.

Cheers!
cb

Cocktail Builder: JavaScript Alcoholic

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Which Cocktails to Show?

AutoComplete: Which items to show?