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Last night at IHOP, after copious amounts of beer at Rocklands, a few of us were
talking about how we cut our food up into differently-sized portions during the
eating process, and I realized that an algorithm exists for maximizing the total
enjoyment of a given serving of food...
Here’s what you do: Instead of just woofing your way linearly through a
stack of pancakes or french toast -- and constantly being aware of exactly
how much you have left to go, and being sad near the end -- what you do is
use recursive subdivision and eat the resulting pieces in a specific order.
Let e (epsilon) be the smallest bite size you are willing to eat, and consider
the following pseudocode:
Procedure Savor (Piece A)
If the size of A is less than 2e
Eat A.
Else
Subdivide A into two equal portions B and C.
Hide B from yourself (the edge of the plate is fine).
Savor C.
Savor B.
End If
End Procedure
I was so excited about this! and here’s why: First, every time you return
from procedure Savor and pop stack, you get a whole new piece of food that
you didn’t know you had (because you hid it from yourself)! Second, that
new piece of food is at least twice the size of the piece you just ate!
So at every step, not only are you surprised by how much you have left,
but you also begin to feel like you have a nearly infinite supply of food!
Third, only at the very last step do you pop stack to nothingness (a sad
event indeed); however, at the point this happens, you’ll’ve just eaten a
very, very small piece (as opposed to a large piece), making the transition
to nothingness relatively painless and Zen-like.
I tested the algorithm out on the second half of six half-pieces of French
toast. I never had French toast from IHOP that tasted so good.
Note that this algorithm doesn’t apply well to liquids in bottles or
glasses because subdividing a body of liquid is not only time consuming
but messy. This algorithm lends itself well to two-dimensional food items
cut with the side of a fork because you are making cuts there anyway.
--Todd
xfut => lugnet.off-topic.geek
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