Game Theory - Can Chicken Nuggets SAVE YOUR LIFE?! (Kindergarten)

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he proves that Chicken Nuggets just might be the KEY to saving your life...

Hello internet. Welcome to Nugget Theory, where only those most deserving of Nugget's wisdom are permitted to watch. All others will feel the wrath of the Maddy Theory Nugget. Who are you? What are you doing in my recording closet? Nugget will not forget this. Nugget away. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that teaches you high school math by offing a school full of kindergartners. But Matt Pat, I hear you saying. I've never even heard of a game like that. You mean you're doing another episode on haunted animatronics? And to that I say no! Not today!

Probably two episodes from now. No, today we're not killing kids in a haunted pizza restaurant. We're killing them on a family-friendly playground. Truly, game theory is expanding its horizons. Loyal theorists, welcome to the world of kindergarten. One of the best games of 2017 and hands down one of my favorite games we have ever covered on GT Live. To give you context though, Kindergarten is the ultimate replayable child murder masterpiece of our time. An 8-bit life is strange where you relive the same Monday over and over and over again,

attempting to figure out the right series of events to complete each character's storyline. Are you gonna try to be the best boyfriend ever to popular girl Cindy by dumping a bucket of blood on another classmate's head? Will you fall victim to Mr. Sweepie as the janitor tries to dispose of suspicious-looking bags in the bathroom. Or are you gonna unravel the mystery behind your fellow classmate Billy's disappearance? Nugget Mrs. Billy. And then there's Nugget. That's me. The friendless weirdo who definitely smells like last night's pizza and kills off the class bully with a poisoned processed chicken ball. We all know a kid like this growing up, the one who eats the paste, or in the case of our game digs a hole behind the school that leads to a satanic worship

pit. It is not for the worshipping of Satan. It is the Nuggett Cave, reserved only for those Do have proven difference you put your nugget? Well, whatever it's called is a giant hole in the ground dug into the school sandbox. But here's the kicker. Depending on how you played the game, you'll either survive your jump into the Nugget Cave or... Not so much. Do you want to find out, sure? Are you gonna kick me in...

Jeez! What?! The difference between you breaking your little Kinderhead on the bottom of the Nugget Cave and actually surviving is this. What's that? Poop a bunch of... Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Don't adjust the resolution of this YouTube video. you're seeing that right, that's a small child emptying his pants of hundreds of chicken nuggets to break your fall when you jump.

And it's moments like that, ladies and gentlemen, that make kindergarten one of the best games of 2017. But now for the real question. And I bet you all know where this is headed. Is this actually possible? Can a giant pile of chicken nuggets actually make the difference between surviving and not surviving a fall? Yes, loyal theorists, that's what you clicked on this video to Find out today. To get started, any falling object, unsuspecting Kindergarner or otherwise Experiences acceleration due to gravity, just like you learned in eighth grade physics. Accelerate too much and when the ground suddenly comes up to meet you, you're going too fast to stop safely. When you hit the ground, you're going from some speed to zero in a fraction of a second,

and the force of that stop is too much for your body to handle, so it breaks. It's the classic saying of, it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop. But, that being said, if there's something there to catch you, then you have a better shot of surviving. That's why stuntmen land in giant airbags. Those airbags stretch out the time it takes to stop a body's momentum to zero. The longer the period of time used in changing the momentum of the falling human, the less force that's going to be released on the impact. Airbags work because they slow down the impact of the falling body

by allowing the body to displace a large volume of air. The greater the displacement, the slower the final impact, and the less chance of injury. So, theoretically, a similar principle could work with chicken nuggets. If you're landing on a big, pillowy pile of processed chicken parts, the air, moisture, and inherent sponginess of the meat is gonna spread out your force and give you more time to slow down than, say, the rock floor of the nugget cave. Or, at least in theory, that's what we hope. Which begs the question, just how good are chicken nuggets at acting like a pillow? Can they actually save you? And the most important question of all, which, Dipping sauce should you bring when you hit the bottom. Just kidding, that last one isn't even a question. It's Moulon's Seshuan Dipping Sauce.

And THAT's... The way the news goes! Now, you might be thinking that a rudimentary 8-bit game wouldn't give us enough information to figure any of this out, but we actually have everything we need to solve this theory. We know how long it takes for a kindergartner to fall from the top to the bottom of the hole, because we hear the thud when they hit the ground. Goodbye, Lily. No!

The pretty Lily. Do Lily should not enter the Nugget Cave without my pewey Nugget cushion. Yeah, sucks to be her. So after timing out this horrific child's death, I was able to conclude that our fall time is 2.7 seconds. Since Lily starts at a velocity of zero and is accelerating only due to the force of gravity, which is 9.8 meters per second squared, we're able to calculate that the depth of the Nugget Cave is 35.7 meters. 35.7 meters is over 100 feet, or 10 stories high, which is a size. A seriously impressive hole to be hand dug by a kindergartner during recesses using a tiny plastic shovel.

But based on that, we can calculate our speed when we hit the bottom of the cave. It's almost 60 miles per hour. 96 kilometers per hour. This tells us right away that he's definitely going fast enough to die on impact. NASA estimates that on average, humans can technically survive an impact of up to 38 miles per hour, but above that, you're pretty much guaranteed to die instantly. And according to the Journal of Pediatric Surgery, the survival rate for children is 50% once you start throwing them off of buildings that are five stories high. Don't really know how they got those test results in.

Don't really want to know. It's for science! And that's only five stories high. Our kindergartener is falling from twice that height. So yeah, Nugget, I hope you're confident in the breaking power of your breaded pile of protein. You know, my pet, Nugget would not lie to you unless you betrayed Nuggets burned a friendship. Now to figure out whether Nuggets will break our fall, we need to know how soft they are. And it turns out they need to be really soft.

The maximum force your spine can take in a beat first fall is 23 G's before you start to crumple like a human accordion. For context, when you go on a roller coaster, the max G's that you feel is about 3 to 6. And when Apollo 16 re-entered Earth's atmosphere, it only got up to 7 Gs. Right now, when we jump straight down into the uncushioned Nugget cave, we're getting hit with almost 30 Gs of force at the bottom. Way over the threshold to kill us. That means we need a lot of cushioning, but can chicken nuggets actually do the job? To find out we need to know how compressible chicken nuggets are. Compressibility is basically how much given object has when you put weight on it. Concrete's not very compressible. My love handles... sadly very compressible. I mean rock hard. I'm totally swole bro. Can't spell fabulous without a Yeah, I just need to stop sitting on my butt right in episodes and do exercise.

So to test the compressibility of chicken nuggets, Steph and I actually ran around town collecting nuggets from a variety of different restaurants. Once we had successfully creeped out every drive-through in a 10-mile radius by cleaning them out of their nuggets supplies, it was time to test the compressibility under different weights. Yeah, pay for some nugs. I hate myself for calling it nugs. Don't ever call it nugs.

No, never. Based on those calculations, I was able to plot out the squishability of chicken nuggets in this very professional looking graph. Ooh, ah, we didn't even bother to label the axes. Man, that would be like 20 points off if this was graded. The first thing you'll notice here is that chicken nuggets aren't created equal. Wendy's nuggets are far and away the softest and best for compression. Meanwhile, McDonald's nuggets have a hard outer crust that's way too solid and

barely compresses it all. So we know right off the bat, if we're going for softness, we're reaching for Wendy's and not the old McDo. Don't worry, McDonald's. your barbecue sauce is still my favorite. Because you're literally right around the corner from where I live, I'm just going to you first. That's just laziness. I also found out from our field tests that chicken nuggets have a weird inflection point

where you get just the right amount of weight to squish the nugget down, usually around 5 pounds, but then after that, most of the compression is done, no matter how much more weight you add to them. This presents some serious problems. The thing about chicken nuggets is that, you know, they're a bunch of small flat patties of meat. And unlike packing peanuts,

airbags or even plastic balls in a ball pit, they don't scatter. And they're not filled with a lot of air that you can compress. I mean, sure, they give you a little bit, but even a stack of a hundred nuggets only sinks a few inches. It turns out that the harder you hit them with the weight, the more they just become one massive, congealed lump of smushed nugget brick. Plus, as you begin to add more and more nuggets to the top of the pile, those nuggets start to weigh down the nuggets on the bottom.

Basically negating all the compression room that we wanted to have ready to catch our fall. in the first place. So after extrapolating these graphs out to include stacks of hundreds or even thousands of nuggets, you start to see a disturbing pattern emerge. Instead of creating a soft pillow of nuggets to catch our fall, we've just created a greasy, meaty, floor with a little bit of give, but not enough to slow our toddler hurtling towards the ground at 60 miles an hour. Even if the stack was 500 nuggets tall, by adding 21 inches of compressible nugget goodness for landing, you'd still only be reducing that force from 30 G's to 27. That means that even incredibly tall stacks of nuggets aren't gonna compress to break the fall enough for us to survive.

And that's kind of a bummer, really. I'm usually all about finding a way to make the physics of these things work out, but in this case you have to remember, you're jumping out of a 10th story window into a pile of formerly frozen meat. So is the nuggets cave an impossibility then? Is nuggets forever cursed? Never to enter his beloved nugget had a... ever again?

Well, not so fast there, my nuggety friend. You might not be able to break your fall with chicken nuggets, but if you take this whole experiment to its extreme, let's face it, that's the whole point of game theory in the first place, then there is technically a way that the nuggets could save you. Instead of cushioning your fall, what you'd actually need is enough nuggets to make your fall shorter. A pile of nuggets so tall that it lessens your fall distance to a point that you're no longer hitting speeds that result in deadly deceleration.

we've established our Nugget Cave is 117 feet or 35.7 meters deep and results in us traveling at 60 miles per hour or 96.5 kilometers per hour at impact. We also know that technically we can survive a fall that gets us up to speeds of 38 miles per hour or 61 kilometers an hour. After running some numbers we were able to calculate that our maximum fall distance to stay under that speed has to be less than 14.2 meters or less than 46.5 feet. Basically the equivalent of a four and a half story building. It is too rather high. Sure it is. You don't see me jumping off a four story building, but it is technically survivable, so if we can stack nuggets high enough, we can just land on top of the big pile and slide the rest of the way down.

This means that we need a stack of chicken nuggets 73 feet tall. A literal mountain of nuggets. An average nugget is 0.5 inches thick, meaning you'd need a stack of nuggets 1,772 nuggets high just to get to a survivable. height. But that's just talking about a single column of nuggets. Obviously you need a pile of nuggets wide enough to catch you. Naturally, a pile of nuggets will fall into the shape of a cone. And believe it or not, there is actual documented science that you can use to help find the dimensions of this fictional 2000 nugget high chicken cone. You can find the shape of this chicken cone by using what's known as its angle of repose. Whenever you create a pile of some substance, grain, gravel, breaded fast food goodness, it tends to form the same style of

of cone every time. All of these cones have a standard angle of repose. Basically how steep the sides of the cones made from that material are. For the theory today I decided to use bark as the stand-in for chicken nuggets because of its similar weight and thicker more oblong shapes. Also because wood chips are often called nuggets. That gave me an angle of repose of 45 degrees. Armed with that information and some simple trigonometry we can calculate the radius and then the volume of the cone, which is get this, almost 12,000 cubic meters of chickeny delight. That is nearly three million gallons of nuggets. But then how many individual nuggets does that huge number translate two? Well, if you divide

this total volume by the volume of one chicken nugget, which is 3.5 times 10 to the negative 5th cubic meters in case you were curious, you get the grand total nugget count to save your life of 340,000, 800,000 chicken nuggets. That is almost 350,000 chicken nuggets. That is almost 350,000 million chicken nuggets as the minimum number to get us to survive our fall into Nuggets Cave. And if that number seems big to you, think about it this way. We're talking about a cone of Nuggets that is as tall as a six-story building. Nuggets pants are not equipped to handle that. Well, I'd say your pants are the least of your worries there, buddy.

I bet your wallet isn't built to handle it either. Buying that many nuggets, even at Burger King's steal of a deal at $1.50 per 10-piece nugget box, You'd be spending over $51 million on chicken flipping nuggets. Nuggets can not afford that. Nuggett has been saving up for Monty's Monster Man card to give to the pretty lily. Well then there you have it, Nugget. Stop digging such deep holes! But most importantly of all, remember, that's just a theory.

A game theory. Thanks for watching.