The creation of cakes and pastries is famously finnicky, depending on exact weight measurements of flour and other ingredients, exact heats and exact times, and painstaking procedures for rolling, kneading, folding and so forth. Modern cake and pastry recipes are the result of generations of careful experimentation, a continuous unbroken esoteric tradition dating back to Roman times and beyond.

But with the advent of modern computation this should no longer be needed. It should be possible to simulate the formation of batter and dough down to the individual gluten proteins, the individual living yeast cells, the moisture levels and Maillard reactions. So what's stopping us? Uncharted worlds of flavor and texture await us. All that's needed is the will and the vision to conquer.

CC: Elon Musk