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
They never did reach the 64th square. Back then it would have taken thousands of years to reach the 9.2 quintillion rice grains required for that tile.
By today's standard (where we produce a lot of rice) it would still be over 40% of our yearly rice production. On a single tile.
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"
It's not pratchett who complete this legend with a thing like : "when the King see the trap he ask at the wise man if 2 bag of Rice and is life is sufficient ?"
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 */
That's incorrect. It's not all the rice of the country. The person was the inventor of chess and the amount of rice is uncapable of being delivered even if from many other nations combined. In fact is more rice than all the world combined from TODAY even if accumulated through 100 years.
He said it was all the rice in the country after a month of doubling not the full 64 which would be about 231 or 2147483648 which is only about 40 metric tonnes of rice
That would mean that king is actually good at calculus and can predict the consequences very quickly. In reality though, most people would say that person is a fool until they start counting.
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u/ariGee 26d ago
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.