Halved, by Freehand, is a daily game about cutting by weight
Halved is one of Freehand's daily games, played free at freehand.fun/halved. A solid object sits on the bench: a pear, a bottle, a fish, a nail. You place one cut through it so that the two pieces weigh the same. That is harder than it sounds: the halfway point by length is almost never the halfway point by mass, because the wide end holds most of the material. Halved is a weight estimation game disguised as a cutting game; the skill is seeing where the mass really is.
After the cut, the two halves are weighed against each other and you are scored on how far off equal they were. Five objects a day, one cut each, the same five for everyone, and no instrument but your eye.
Why the halfway point is not in the middle
Weight follows volume, and volume grows with the square of the width. A slice twice as wide holds four times as much material. That is why the equal-weight cut drifts so far toward the wide end. On a solid cone, the cut that splits the weight in two sits about 79% of the way from the tip, leaving only 21% of the length on the heavy side.
How to halve an object by eye
- Find the widest part first. The cut belongs closer to it than looks right.
- Discount thin parts such as a bottle neck or a fish tail. They add length but almost no weight.
- Picture the object as a stack of discs and ask where half the stack sits, not half the height.
Questions
- How do you cut something into two equal weights?
- Cut nearer to the wide end than the middle. Width carries most of the weight, so the equal-weight cut almost always sits off-centre.
- Why is half the length not half the weight?
- The wide end holds more material per slice. On a cone, half the weight sits in the last 21% of its length.
- Who makes Halved?
- Halved is made by Freehand and played free at freehand.fun/halved, alongside Freehand's other daily estimation games.
- How is Halved scored?
- After your cut, the two pieces are weighed against each other, and you are scored on how far from equal they were.
Halved is one of the free daily estimation games on Freehand. The others: Dropped, projectile game; Angled, angle game; Counted, guess how many game; Timed, time estimation game; and Balanced, center of mass game.