0 present participle of crunch
1 to crush hard food loudly between the teeth, or to make a sound as if something is being crushed or broken:
But then, in the opening sentence of the final chapter, the upbeat story comes to a sudden, crunching end.
The middle way is to reject classicism, with its commitment to a symbol crunching unconscious, in favour of the connectionist computational theory of mind.
Computational mathematics is all about rendering mathematical phenomena in an algorithmic form, amenable to sufficiently precise, affordable and robust number crunching.
In very bad cases, this causes a 'crunching' effect or sometimes other, less objectionable artefacts.
It exercises such abilities as parsing, input/output, recursive data structures and traditional number crunching.
Once we reach the ticking, clattering ostinato (in the film so memorably applied to the expedition ship crunching through pack-ice), things improve tremendously.
This is the success story of numerical analysis, of this 'quantitative number crunching', and nothing should be allowed to obscure it.
It also introduces the idea of cross-tabulation, the preliminary procedure for the "number crunching" discussed in the next chapter.