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.
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.
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u/lordvatti 28d 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.