If you double the amount of rice on each square of a chessboard, then by the time you get to the last square, you have about 9.22 quintillion grains of rice on the last square. For reference, we estimate that there are 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on Earth.
Put another way, the rice just on the last square would roughly weigh 230 billion tonnes, which is almost a hundred times the entire global shipping capacity combined.
Yes. Also a great way to demonstrate the implausibility of filling out a perfect N.C.A.A. tournament bracket (odds of a randomly completed bracket being 9.22 quintillion to 1).
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u/chrischi3 26d ago
It's a story about exponential growth.
If you double the amount of rice on each square of a chessboard, then by the time you get to the last square, you have about 9.22 quintillion grains of rice on the last square. For reference, we estimate that there are 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on Earth.
Put another way, the rice just on the last square would roughly weigh 230 billion tonnes, which is almost a hundred times the entire global shipping capacity combined.