About Cut It in Half
What Is It?
Pretend you're sharing a snack with a friend. Each game has five foods, picked from more than thirty, and you get one straight cut at each one. Try to cut it so both pieces are exactly the same size. When you let go, the pieces slide apart and show how much of the food each one got.
How to Play
Press anywhere, slide across the food, and let go. Only where you start and where you let go matter, so a wobbly swipe still makes a straight cut. The cut goes all the way across the food, even if your swipe stops short of the edge, and the dashed line shows where it will go before you let go.
With a keyboard, press Tab to get to the food, and a knife appears. The arrow keys move it, Q and E turn it, and Enter cuts. Hold Shift for smaller moves. After a cut, Enter goes on to the next food.
Stars
Each cut earns up to three stars, depending on the smaller piece:
| Smaller piece | Stars |
|---|---|
| 49% or more (as close as 49 / 51) | ★★★ |
| 46% or more | ★★★ |
| 40% or more | ★★★ |
| less than 40% | ★★★ |
That makes 15 stars for a perfect game. A cut that comes out 50.0% / 50.0% is perfectly fair.
How It's Measured
Each food is drawn again on a hidden canvas 600 pixels across, and every pixel it covers is counted on one side of the cut or the other. A pixel the food only partly covers, along its edge, counts for the part that's food, and a pixel the cut runs through is shared between the two sides. That makes the count accurate to well under a tenth of a percent.
Everything you can see counts, including crust, stems, leaves, sticks and straws. Holes and bites don't: the holes in the donut, the cheese and the pretzel are empty, and so are the bites out of the chocolate bar and the popsicle.
The foods change a little every time. They're turned, flipped, and made a bit bigger or smaller, and the chips, seeds, holes and sprinkles land in new places. Sometimes somebody has already eaten one of the takoyaki.
Tricks Worth Knowing
Whichever way you swipe, there is always exactly one place to make that cut that splits the food perfectly in half. Slide the cut across the food and the piece on one side shrinks from all of it to none of it, so somewhere along the way it is exactly half.
Some foods look the same upside down: the hot dog, and very nearly the cookie and the donut. Any cut through the middle of one of those halves it, whichever way you swipe.
Triangles are trickier, like the cheese (if it had no holes) and the pizza slice (nearly). A cut from a corner to the middle of the opposite side halves a triangle. But a cut straight across, parallel to one side, has to be a lot closer to that side than it looks: only about 29% of the way from it to the opposite corner, because the piece near the corner is so thin.
Long foods with most of the food at one end, like the carrot, the lollipop and the drumstick, have to be cut nearer the fat end than the middle.
Some foods come in pieces, like the cherries and the takoyaki. The cut doesn't have to go through every piece: with two pieces the same size, a cut between them is perfectly fair.
Best Score
Your best game is saved in your browser, so it sticks around between visits. The button below erases it. It asks first, because this can't be undone.