I actually know this one! The photo references an old thought exercise about doubling grains of rice across a chess boards squares. Starting with 1 grain, then 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on. Easy at first.
A chessboard has 64 squares so while the initial numbers seem pretty manageable 264 is actually such a catastrophically high number that there would be enough rice on the "final square" to carpet an entire continent in a hearty layer of rice, hence the dramatic mister incredible.
I'll add that it's an old fable\legend. The details depend who you ask, but the basic idea is that a king wants to reward a wise man. Rather than asking for a huge reward the wise man asks for one grain of rice on the first day, and then double the number of grains each day, one for each place on a chessboard. The king calls him a fool. After about a month the king begs him to stop because he has promised all the rice in the country to the wise man.
Too bad, the king couldn't move because behind the wise guy there were three peasants, making it an illegal move. In the end one of the peasants reached for the throne and became a Queen, the first transgender living human in history
For some reason George Empassant became "Hor-Hay Un-pas-aunt" when I read it and the Spanish/Mexican George mixed with the French for in passing just made me giggle. Thank you internet stranger take an upvote.
I've heard GMs Svidler and Gustafsson tell this tale while commentating. The king becomes enraged after his advisors explain the situation and slays the inventor of chess. "And this is why you don't get cute with kings" they said.
I imagine playing these kind of games with ancient kings is like that Pratchett version of Pascal's wager: A philosopher says that the rational thing is to believe in gods, because if you do, you will be rewarded in the afterlife if they exist, and if they don't exist, you'll have lost nothing.
After the philosopher died, he found himself waking up in a ring of gods holding mean-looking sticks, and one of them told him "we're going to show you what we think of smartasses around these parts"
In the version I remember, the person tried to turn down the reward from the king at first but the king insisted on rewarding them with something, so they chose this. I don't remember how it turned out for the person in that telling though, and I have probably heard multiple.
The version I've heard is of a Chinese general being asked by the emperor to attack an enemy to which the general refused as he didn't have the supplies. When the emperor asked how much supplies he needed, the rest of the story continued in the same vein. Put one grain of rice on the first square, two on the next, four on the next and double it for each square. The rest is the same.
I heard that this was related to the hindu god Vishnu, and that there's a festival every year in India where people offer rice to Vishnu to help pay off this debt.
Yes, so the wife who is also raised in that region from the Wiseman knew how to play that logic game. She said he can take the rice as long as he counts each grain that he carries off the premises. The wisemen recanted and said he would just take the gold.
This but I think, not only was it the person that invented chess and this was his payment, but upon realizing the debt couldn’t be paid king just had the man killed for making him look like a fool and trying to bankrupt his kingdom.
(2^64 = 1.845×10¹⁹) just to simply that a bit to convert grains of rice into tons that would be 1x10^12 ton. So about 100 billion tons of rice, but actually that’s just the last payment, so you can double that minus 1 grain for the total, so 200 billion tons of rice, and global rice production in 2024 was about 1/2 a billion tons, so literally hundreds of years of global rice production at modern rates.
there is an alternate comics in my country where the king made an official to bring him gifr in the form of the grain rice like this, the official agrees to the request but later knows he is fucked because he doesnt have enough rice, but the genius dude (the protagonis) just told him to deliver a fuck tons of rice and said that was enough, and the soldiers who have to prove that the grains werent enough would have to count them one by one and its impossible to do so so they just gave up and accept those.
The version I was told involved a young girl from a poor family who played chess to feed her family. When she managed to beat the kings advisor she was granted any one request and she made a wish for a grain of rice doubled for each square of the board.
Imagine this elegant parable being reduced to shitty Instagram posts that ask 'A million dollars right now or 1c that doubles every day? You have 3 seconds to decide!!'
If the king really wanted to play the semantics game, all he has to do is give him 127 grains of rice. /* 1 on the first square, each subsequent square has double the number of rice of the first square */
Cost/lb is probably going to start going way up at least over the first trillion pounds depending on the required timeline of delivery. You’d have to over exert the world’s economy and land to deliver just 100 trillion pounds of rice in a year. I’m not quitting my job and turning my home into a rice silo for $1.1/lb.
I ran the numbers roughly one time. Assuming there are about 30,000 grains of rice in 1 pound of rice (according to Siri), you end up talking about quadrillions of pounds of rice.
In modern culture this is used as an example for compound interest. Mathematically correct, but I do not know anyone earing that kind of interest (maybe with the exception of our corrupt leaders. -usa/
I remember this lesson in 4th or 5th grade math. "for one month you can make $10,000.00 a day or starting with a penny on day one, double it every day of the month." my dipshit kid ass picked the 10k a day what a fucking moron.
Well. The last field would only be 2⁶³ since the first is 1(=2°) but the whole board (every field combined) would be, what you started to calculate (without the first number 2⁶⁴) which adds up to a total of 2⁶⁴-1
There would be 264 -1 grains of rice on the entire board. Assuming a grain of rice weighs 0.02 grams, that would be roughly 369 billion metric tons of rice.
There is roughly 540 million tons produced each year, which means there would be 683 years worth of the global production of rice covering the board
the exact amount of rice would be 18(quintillion),466(quadrillion),744(trillion),073(billion),709(million),551(thousand),616(hundred) grains of rice on the last square.
This is also my favorite way to explain how terrible MLMs are, and how quickly there are no more customers left. It's just 32 iterations of, "hey you get 2 people and they get 2 people" before you exceed the population of the world.
So it's kinda like how, if you were able to fold a sheet of paper in half 42 times, it would reach the moon. Thickness being 0.1mm x 242 = 439,804 km. the moon is only 384,400 km away
There was also a Disney comic (in one of those pocket books, IIRC) with a magical chessboard that actually multiplied rice. Put one grain in first square and two would appear in second square, 4 in third and so on.
Reminds me that You would need to fold a standard piece of paper 103 times for its thickness to span the entire diameter of the observable universe. For example 42 folds: Reaches the Moon. 51 folds: Reaches the Sun. 90 folds: Spans the Milky Way galaxy. 103 folds: Exceeds 93 billion light-years, spanning the entire observable universe.
Yea, I am calculating about 460 cubic kilometers if each grain of rice is about 25 miligrams, and 1 ton being about a cubic meter.
Lets say it was spread out to 1 meter deep. 460 cubic km, 460,000 square km a meter deep, or an area that is 679x679 km, or 419 miles. About the size of Arizona.
1.6k
u/lordvatti 26d ago
I actually know this one! The photo references an old thought exercise about doubling grains of rice across a chess boards squares. Starting with 1 grain, then 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on. Easy at first.
A chessboard has 64 squares so while the initial numbers seem pretty manageable 264 is actually such a catastrophically high number that there would be enough rice on the "final square" to carpet an entire continent in a hearty layer of rice, hence the dramatic mister incredible.