P2_3 Like Looking for an Assassin in a Haystack

The “Leap of Faith” is an extraordinary and repeatable stunt, whereby people jump from buildings into haystacks, performed by characters in the popular computer game series Assassin’s Creed. By considering the elastic deformation of wheat straw it was found that if a person were to attempt this they would experience deceleration nearly 8000 times that of gravity, resulting in certain death. Introduction In the computer game series Assassin’s Creed characters routinely find themselves leaping from atop high buildings, in various settings from the Middle Eastern Middle Ages to renaissance Rome, only to land safely and comfortably in bales of hay [1]. As the action is infinitely repeatable and the bales do not change shape through the game, a simplified analysis was undertaken, considering the one dimensional elastic compression of wheat straw and the deceleration experienced by a person having completed a typical leap. Theory The vertical velocity, v, of an object accelerated, from rest, by gravity, g, over a height, h, is given by the equation [2],