Split dessert in style
Sharing pudding is a piece of cake with this knife-wielding robot
“I make a mean Victoria sponge,” says A. Baker. “Trouble is, after dinner, everyone wants a slice and splitting dessert between seven is no piece of cake. How do I keep them all sweet and distribute the pudding with precision?”
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Game theory has given us some fascinating algorithms for cutting cake in the fairest way. Some have even appeared on the pages of New Scientist. But break out the protractor at the dinner table and you might find yourself with a simpler solution – eating alone. If you have neither a steady hand nor a head for sums, the obvious alternative is to automate.
To craft a robot with slicing skills, I first attached a knife to a motorised arm, like any responsible adult might do. Next, I cobbled together a motorised lazy Suzan from Lego to rotate the cake under the hovering knife. I now had a way to precisely control the angles of my cake slices.
The simple maths required is handled by a microprocessor brain in an adjacent control box. Just enter the number of slices you want, and Cakebot works out how far to spin the plate between cuts. It calculates the exact angle of attack by rounding slices to the nearest degree. After all, what’s a few degrees between friends? Literally crumbs.
Everything is better with buttons, chocolate or otherwise, so I added a big panel of digits below a screen to make it easier to tell Cakebot how many guests I have.
There’s always an awkward individual, however, who wants a half-sized piece or an extra large one to “share” with their beau. A manual override lets me become a cake dictator and tell Cakebot exactly how many degrees each slice should be. And it’s not just cake. Pies, pizzas, wheels of cheese all work too – your only constraint is the circularity of your food.
To show off my invention, I invited a group of friends for dinner and told them to all bring cake – only to see them turn up with loaf cakes and square tins of brownies. Just great.
Still, the cheese course offered a chance to shine. Unfortunately, in my excitement, I added an extra zero, so 10 of us got to watch my robot obliterate a round of brie. At least we all got an equal portion of mangled cheese.
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