Google browser game honors Wilbur Scoville

The doodle is in honour of Wilbur Lincoln Scoville’s 151st birthday who invented the way to measure pepper’s heat. The Scoville Organoleptic test assesses the amount of capsaicin in hot peppers in Scoville heat units (SHU) as measure of the spice levels.

First discovered in 1816, the ingredient producing spiciness in chilli peppers is a compound called Capsaicin. The Carolina Reaper, is now one of the hottest peppers in the world scoring 1,569,300 on the Scoville heat-measuring scale!

The doodle is an interactive representation of the Scoville heat scale.

In celebration of Scoville’s 151’st birthday, Google designed an interactive mini game that lets users help Scoville “cool down” various type of chillies for his experiment. The backdrop has different variety of peppers.

The Trinidad moruga scorpion is recognized as the hottest chili pepper on the planet – but it’s unlikely we could all agree on the hotness of any pepper without Wilbur Scoville.

Pure capsaicin has a Scoville rating of 16 million SHU. The background of the doodle is covered with various kinds of pepper.

In order to play the game, all you have to do is head to Google.com and click the play button on the image at the top of the page.

There are five peppers in the game. Scoville eats a pepper, and the visitor must guess how much ice cream he needs to counter its heat. The Google logo demonstrates that by letting you cool down the spicy foods by throwing ice cream at them until they cool down using the scale. You need to throw ice-cream on the peppers to neutralise them.

To counter this, modern scientists have refined Scoville’s scale somewhat and now use high performance liquid chromatography, Twilight Greenaway reported for Smithsonian Magazine.