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Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

I got 15 cheeses from FR a few days ago (all French cheeses from the vicinity of Blois) and it had 100% of them wrong. Cheese 16 was a cheddar and it categorised that as Comte, but now I see here that it only recognises French ones? I do like the idea though; my wife can recognise many on sight and smell but I am more of a barbarian and know practically nothing about these except that I like or not like; it would be a handy app for me anyway if it performed better.

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Funny, I just tried it on a comte and it thought it was gruyere. Still probably a better guess than a lot of people I know would give

(Edit, reading below I see others noticed the same thing)

Compté basically is Gruyère: same recipe, same process, same taste profile, just slightly different terroir.

(https://www.thephcheese.com/gruyere-and-comte-two-of-a-kind)

Fair enough, though the reason I posted was because the GP did get cheddar misclassified as comte so it evidently can propose both comte and gruyere as labels. Maybe the taxonomy could be revised to make it respond gruyere/compte if they are really indistinguishable.

Where I am, comte is usually wider than gruyere. If this generally holds, that could be what it uses to distinguish them, and actually I showed it a cut piece so maybe that's why it thought gruyere.

With more time / motivation, it would be interesting to do a study looking at whether size and orientation can change the predicted label. Like if I cut cheddar into a wedge would it think its brie?

Comté. Note that it is very interesting that to make good Swiss Gruyère, you need Montbéliarde cow milk. At the turn of the last century, farmers from France effectively passed calves across the border by carrying them on the back and doing very dangerous mountain climbing[0].

[0]: https://www.sac-cas.ch/fr/cabanes-et-courses/portail-des-cou...

It's a gold idea from an advertising agency. It's sadly just fluff for award shows.

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