TESTERS of cornflakes and potato snacks may soon be superseded by a "crunchmeter" that uses fractal geometry to gauge their crispiness.
Developed by food scientists at the Hebrew University in Rehovot, Israel, the device consists of a chamber in which a sample of food or other material is gradually crushed. Microphones pick up the noise produced and generate a graph plotting decibels against time.
The result is a rugged line, made up of spikes and troughs. A computer expresses the wiggly line as a fractal dimension. In fractal geometry, a straight line has a dimension, or "fractal number" of one and a plane a dimension of two. The more wiggly a line is, the more it fills up the plane in which it liesand the closer its dimension is to two.
The crunchier a potato chip is, explains Amos Nussinovitch, leader of the team that created the crunchmeter, the longer ...
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