There are many ways to eat an Oreo, from just taking a bite to my preferred method, dunking it in milk until it's deliciously soggy. But for many, the time-tested tradition is to twist the cookie in half and see which side got all the icing. And now, engineers with a little too much time on their hands have cracked the code of how to predict which side gets the icing.

Quartz reports that back in 2014, three Princeton graduate students studying mechanical and aerospace engineering were chatting about the "Oreo twist-off game," which would help them settle disputes as kids, wishbone-style. But one of them remembered having one friend as a kid who always won the game. How did he do it? They decided to experiment until they figured it out.

[youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kD3L3Ypqps&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

They put cookies into complicated machinery to test exactly what happens with different separation techniques, from twisting to pulling apart. They also tested on their family and friends, using bulk boxes of hundreds of Oreos. But it turns out that there's no complicated physics to the twist-off game, just manufacturing techniques.

If you want to predict which side will get the icing, just test one cookie from the box. Every other cookie in your entire package will turn out the same way. According to the Princeton scientists, just position your Oreo box so the text faces the right way, then take the cookie out from the upper left hand corner. If the icing is on the left side, it'll be on the left side for every other cookie, and the same goes if the icing is on the right.

Oreo won't give away its secrets, but the Princeton team thinks that during manufacturing, a machine pumps the icing onto one wafer and then puts the second wafer on top. The icing just sticks better to the first wafer, kind of like hot glue, and then the cookies are loaded into the packages all in the same way. It's unclear whether the same method goes for the Double Stuf and other varieties, so you'll just have to undergo your own delicious experiments to find out.

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