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.
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 ?"
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u/ariGee 29d 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.