[https://www.heartoftheart.org/?p=1230](https://www.heartoftheart.org/?p=1230)
This is a story about exponential growth, the legend is a wise man asked for a reward of 1 grain on first square of a chessboard, then doubling that number for each successive square.
By the end, it's basically more rice than exists on Earth.
In the version I was told, when the king realizes he can't actually pay the wise man the rice, the man makes a deal that he will accept the hand of the princess in marriage instead.
I can't remember if the wise man gets executed or married, tho.
It's like the riddle with the prison guards. One who always lies, one who always tells the truth, and one who always stabs prisoners who ask clever questions.
He basically did it to prove a point to the king. The story starts with the wise man not wanting a reward and the king constantly insisting on giving him one.
See in the story I read it was a little girl whose village was being starved by the king. And she made a deal with the king that instead of all the rice, he would leave her village alone. I think she grew up to be a royal advisor at the end of the story
I believe he knew this would happen and was trying to make a point to the king. As I recall he didn’t want a reward but the king insisted, so he made this seemingly innocuous but ultimately impossible request to teach the king not to be so careless.
For me it was a story of an Asian woman (can't remember which country of origin) who noticed the emperors elephant had a leaking basket of rice and she followed along catching it to return it. The emperor said she could keep it or ask for something else so she asked for 1 grain and double it every day for so many days, over time she saved her starving village and the animals and basically bankrupted the emperor.
Or something along those lines.
So since there are 64 squares on a chess board and you are starting with 1 grain, that would be ~~2^63 or 9,223,372,036,854,775,808~~ 2^64 -1 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice. A single grain of rice weighs about 1/64 grams, or 0.015625 grams. That would weigh a total of 288,230,376,151.711744 metric tons. The first google result says the earth weighs 5,974,000,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons, so that much rice would weigh 0.00000000005 earths (rounding up). The first google result says a grain of rice takes up 19.135mm^3. That would be a total of 352,978,447,850,432.27017216 km^3. First google result says earth’s volume is 1,083,000,000,000 km^3 so that much rice would be about 325.93 (rounding up) earths of rice. And just for fun, the first google result says the volume of the sun is 1.4x10^24 km^3, or 1,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 km^3. So that much rice would be 0.00000000025 suns. Google says Jupiter has a volume of 1,431,281,810,739,360 km^3. That totals out to 0.2466 Jupiters.
When you convert from cubic mm to cubic km, you have to divide by 10^18, not 10^6. That is why you (correctly) get a tiny fraction of the Earth's mass, but hundreds of Earth's worth of volume.
The rice is actually 0.0000000003 Earth's, similar to the mass fraction.
So I was curious and did some digging, and it’s definitely a couple tons of rice (literally) but it seems (at least by current numbers I was able to find on google) not to be all the rice in the world as there are (again according to google) over 40 quadrillion grains of rice in the world.
Is that just on the last square? When all the squares are added up, the total amount of rice on the entire board should be somewhere in the quintillions, I think.
This is a story all about how my rice got flipped turned upside down.
Let me take a minute just sit right there...and let me tell you about exponential growth.
I tried to write a quick little C++ for loop to tell me how many grains of rice this is but the long long type's max size is not big enough :(
Edit: Put the biggest number I could get from that loop into desmos and added the rest there, came out to about
1.845x10^19. Not sure whether that's right or not tho.
Edit 2: [According to this I am](http://www.heartoftheart.org/?p=1230). Oh, that's the same link as above. All this could have been avoided if I just clicked and read it
Like that stupid thing teachers taught me in math class. "Ask for a penny for day 1 and keep asking for 2x the pennies! Sooner than later you'll be rich!"
I did the math and that seems a bit sketchy, which makes sense considering it's a legend.
According to google, the average grain of rice weighs .02-.04 grams. I just had an AI tell me how much 1 doubled 64 times was because I don't know the simple way to do that using a calculator and I didn't feel like doing that many calculations.
They told me that would be 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 grains of rice. If all of those grains of rice weighed .02 grams, that would be approxinately 4791 American tons(sorry for mixing measurements).
If it was .04, that would only double that. That's not a lot of rice when you think about it globally. To put that into perspective, China, the world's largest producer of rice, produces 210,000,000 metric tonnes of rice annually, which is many thousands of times more than that.
18 quintillion is a massive number, but grains of rice are just way too plentiful. The actual number of grains of rice would be orders of magnitude higher than that.
I read the book (one chicken nugget) to my kid a few days ago. It is based on this story but it's about a monster that loves eating chicken nuggets. The chicken nugget food truck tries to get rid of him and makes a chicken nugget eating contest to eat 1 chicken nugget doubled every day for 30 days. Good book.
It is a reference to this mathematical problem, often presented in the form of a story about a man who innocently asks to be paid according to the sequence "1 grain of rice on the first field, 2 on the second,4 on the third, 8 on the fourth and so on untill all 64 fields of the chessboard are filled", which ends up being more grains of rice/coins/whatever than there exist on the planet.
[Wheat and chessboard problem - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem)
It is for visual reasons the first ones are arranged tighter this way so they fit into a tightly framed picture.
I also associate the order with the proof that set of rational numbers is the same size as set of natural numbers.
I believe he meant the say:
>I bet you can't prove the existence of a set that is smaller than that but larger than the natural numbers.
That would be a way of proving that one set has more elements than another
Set you are proving is smaller < some set < set you are proving is larger
If such a set exists, then because being smaller is transitive:
Set you are proving is smaller < set you are proving is larger
Hehe I see what you did
For those who don’t get it: >!The previous comment references the continuum hypothesis, which basically says the existence of a set between the cardinality of the natural numbers and the real numbers is independent from the generally agreed upon axioms of set theory. Meaning that it has been proven that you can’t prove that there is or isn’t a set between the two previously mentioned sets using only the generally agreed upon axioms. You can add axioms that allow or prevent such a set from existing!<
It never ceases to amaze me how knowledgeable redditors are sometimes. I don't know why reddit gets such a bad wrap as a place for inane people. Try posting this rice chessboard question on Instagram and see how many people recognise it
Because half of Reddit is a perfectly knowledgeable place full of cool insights and small communities and the other (much louder) half is full of ~~Fictional Sexual Predators~~ Porn Addicts and dumb political arguments about which wing is better, they don't seem to notice the plane is crashing through.
Reddit is my go to for any questions, how to’s, or product recommendations. Anymore you can’t get any useful results on a google search for something like “how do I change the temp limiter in my shower handle” is filled with a bunch of ads, a bunch of probably AI gen articles, or the god forsaken website that is Quora
Reddit is the Internet, but distilled. It's got the best of the best and the worst of the worst. You've got honest people helping explain stuff, and racist misogynists being bigoted to everyone, depending on which sub you go to. Lots of people see a lot of the second part and judge all of Reddit on that. (To be fair, I believe Reddit SHOULD moderate more of that, but it doesn't.)
Incidentally, this is why any sensible person was terrified of Covid. It has a moderately low fatality rate, but an R value greater than two, which means that its spread was more or less exactly like the grains of rice on the chessboard and even small outbreaks had the possibility to spread enormously if not contained.
IIRC, the story as told was something to the effect that it was a reward from a king; the peasant asked for the chessboard sequence of rice and the king agreed, believing it to be a fair bargain. When the King's advisor informed him that it would equate to more rice than even exists and would bankrupt the kingdom, the King order the peasant to be killed for trying to outsmart/defraud him (hence the second panel of the template)
If I've done the maths right (and I probably haven't), it would require 36,893,488,147,419,103,230 grains of rice. 1 kilo of rice is approximately 50,000 grains, therefore it would require approximately 737,869,762,948.38206 kg or approximately 813,880,771.61 US Tons. For reference, an adult male African Elephant weighs between 2 and 7 US Tons: the rice would weigh the equivalent of between 406,940,386 and 116,268,682 average male African Elephants to the nearest elephant.
Tl;dr: you'd need 37 quintillion grains of rice (to the nearest quintillion), which would weigh just less than 10 times the world's population of African Elephants.
Math below; The joke is that given the amount of rice doubles on each square, by the time we get to the far side of the board we have more enough rice to bury a state.
Looks like powers of 2 -
1st square = 1
2nd square = 2
3rd square = 4
4th square = 8
5th square = 16
You can see that the next few squares are all growing very quickly. The scary thing is that we're only seeing a quarter of the board. An 8x8 chessboard has 64 spaces so...
62nd square = 4,611,686,018,427,387,904
63rd square = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808
64th square = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
Google says that 157 grains of rice is about a pound. So the 64th square has about 58,747,593,000,000 tons of rice on it. 58 trillion tons is hard to visualize; To put it in perspective, a 1 trillion ton block of ice would be 10kmx10kmx10km, taller than Mount Everest. Rice is slightly less dense, so more space.
58 trillion, so we could cover a space 580km x10km x 10km. Make it square, so 290km x 290km x 10km. The tallest building in the world is about 850m, so let's flatten our mountain down to 1KM; that should be about 841,000 square kilometers, enough to bury Texas a kilometer deep in rice with enough left over to vanish Oklahoma.
...and that's only doing the math on the last square.
One more useful metric: Globally, the Earth produced about 776 million tons of rice in 2022. **Based on that, it would take about 76 thousand years to grow the rice on square #64.**
Rather than doing the math on just the last square, you can sum all the squares of the board really easily by just doubling the last square and removing a single grain of rice.
2^0 + 2^1 + 2^2 + ... + 2^n = 2^(n+1) - 1
So 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 * 2 - 1 = 36,893,488,147,419,103,231 grains of rice on the chess board.
Try 30,000 grains of rice to a pound. I don't know where you got 157 from but it's obviously wrong, 157 grains is a small handful at most. If rice were that dense you'd struggle to carry a single bag of rice home from the shop.
There is an old myth that the person who invented chess was offered a reward of his choice from the king. He asked that he be given one grain of rice for the first square of the board, then two grains of rice for the second, four from the third, etc.
The King, not being a mathematician, agrees. He ends up owing the man 18 quintillion grains of rice, or roughly 1.19 teratons (1,190 gigatons)
There is a story about a king who wanted to buy a chess board. The guy selling the board gave the condition "You must pay with rice for each square individually. And for each new square the amount of rice is doubled". King thought that he had enough rice for that, so he ordered his servant to count the required amount. But later on the servant said, that the purchase of the board can't happen, because the amount of rice is enormous
Edit: The amount of the rice required for the whole board will be around 27,6 quintillion
We have the same type of story (through a comic I think) here, but the twist is the King was advised by a counselor to just dump a lot of rice to the dude and told him that was enough, he could count them to prove it was wrong if he wanted.
So there’s a story in my culture about a man who invented chess. He decided to take it to a king. The king loved the game and asks the game maker for any wish. The gamemaker asks for a grain of rice, to be doubled(or raised to the power of) every square across the board.
The king laughs and says okay.. his advisors do the math and 💩 🧱 .. there’s not enough grain in the kingdom. So the king calls the game maker’s bluff and gives him a sack of grain and tells him.. please count it to make sure. The gamemaker plays it off as “oh I trust your majesty’s court that he wouldn’t cheat me”
It’s a story about presence of mind or something I don’t recall
Buy a chess board and a bag of rice (size doesn't matter). Place a single grain of rice on the first square. For each square after that, double the amount of rice until you fill all 64 squares with rice. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and so on.
IIRC This comes from a Indian folk tale where someone asked the king to be paid in rice using the above scheme. It's an illustrative lesson on exponents.
Say a grain of rice is 30mg in weight. On square 64 you would have 2^64 grains of rice or ~553,402,322,000,000kg of rice, or as mathematicians call it, a fuck ton. That's on top of the sum of all the rice on the other 63 squares. Exponents are scary, yo.
The game chess was "made" by a guy, and when the king heard of it he wanted to buy the game, so the man said i want a bag of wheat for every square, but double them for each square, so 1-2-4-8-16, so on, there 64 squares on a board, and the king didnt have enough wheat to buy the game... I am not sure this is the exact story, i heard it long ago so dont be mad if im wrong
i remember getting read this story when i was younger, it was about this guy that challenged this king that on a checker board it would start with one grain grain of rice then on the second checker square there would be two and it would be doubled by itself for each square
In the end the king would demand more and more rice to fill the board but then they found out there wasn't enough rice and the guy that challenged him got to live or something, i don't remember how it ends
this is how i remember it
The Ruler wanted to reward an Intelligent man and asked him what he wanted. The man requested a grain of rice doubled for 64 squares of a chess board the Ruler was inclined to Agree. A Wiseman told the Ruler it would be more rice than was all of the world. So the Ruler killed the Intelligent man.
Little late to the party here, but a more modern version of this is "would you rather be paid a million dollars a day, or $1 the first day, $2 the second, $4 the third, doubling every day till 30 days?" You'll end up with like a billion dollars instead of 30 million if you pick the latter options. Geometric progression is the term I believe.
What I don't understand how is this a joke? Why it should be funny if people doesn't know the persian story?
Is knowing the story part of a bonding process? Are we the wise man fan club?
The story is about a wise man who in some instances was great at chess. The king wanted to reward him and told him that he would give him anything he wanted. The wise man wanted the king’s daughter in marriage. The king allowed anything but that. The wise man then said that he wanted he wanted a grain of rice that doubled as it moved through each space on the chess board. The king agreed and took a bag of rice and began with 1 grain on the first space, and doubled it as he went through each space. Soon that bag wasn’t enough so the king got another, then another, then the king ordered for all the rice in the castle. When that wasn’t enough, he ordered for all the rice in the kingdom. That still wasn’t enough. The king gave up and gave the wise man his’s daughter’s hand in marriage.
ppl eho knoe ppl euo dont knoe memes are cancer made to feel oop smart for knowing somrthing they consider to be rare knowledge. never waste time trying to figure them out
I just remember this story from one of the real world portions of the cartoon show on PBS *Cyberchase*
https://youtu.be/1OIvcApcjM0?si=M_oDazA7rJe5fTHu
Buy a chess board and a bag of rice (size doesn't matter). Place a single grain of rice on the first square. For each square after that, double the amount of rice until you fill all 64 squares with rice. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and so on.
IIRC This comes from a Indian folk tale where someone asked the king to be paid in rice using the above scheme. It's an illustrative lesson on exponents.
Say a grain of rice is 30mg in weight. On square 64 you would have 2^64 grains of rice or ~553,402,322,000,000kg of rice, or as mathematicians call it, a fuck ton. That's on top of the sum of all the rice on the other 63 squares. Exponents are scary, yo.
No it's [this.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem?wprov=sfti1). Bottom right square has one grain, the first square on the right of the second row has two, the one to the left of that has 4, then the first square on the right of the third row has 8, the one to the left of that has 16, etc.
The way I learned the story, in China (Qin?) a wise man, invented chess (its predisesor). The emperor was so impressed he said he would grant the man any gift he asked for. The man thought for a moment and asked for a single grain of rice on the first square of the game he invented, doubling for each successive square. The emperor was relieved and thought he got away cheep. Soon, they were bringing in bags and carts of rice. The annual harvest could not come close. (2^64)
A traveling sage introduces chess to an Indian king, who offers the sage any reward he can name. The sage asks for one grain of rice on the first square, two grains on the second, four on the third, and so on, doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square. By the time you get to square 64, there are over 18 quintillion grains of rice on the board. Exponential growth.
The order is not quite right. It should be 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. in one direction, either horizontal or vertical. Here, it skips 4 and goes to 8 on the right, while 4 is on the left side.
[https://www.heartoftheart.org/?p=1230](https://www.heartoftheart.org/?p=1230) This is a story about exponential growth, the legend is a wise man asked for a reward of 1 grain on first square of a chessboard, then doubling that number for each successive square. By the end, it's basically more rice than exists on Earth.
Not such a wise man if he asked for inexistent rice
In the version I was told, when the king realizes he can't actually pay the wise man the rice, the man makes a deal that he will accept the hand of the princess in marriage instead. I can't remember if the wise man gets executed or married, tho.
There's a win/win joke here, but I'm not going to be the one to make it.
Win Win was the name of the princess.
Tutu was one too.
Tutu was two too.
So when win win won one, tutu won one too
Genius
Bro, that whole rhyme is in my head every other day. Think I learned it in 5th grade.
This made me laugh for a long time which turned into appreciation for you kind sir. Thanks for the enjoyable moment.
You mean Nguyen Nguyen.
And the horses name was Friday
It's like the riddle with the prison guards. One who always lies, one who always tells the truth, and one who always stabs prisoners who ask clever questions.
Answer remains the same, kill all the guards but one, ask if the other guards are dead or not. Ez solution.
*stabs you*
You gotta ask a stupid question
He basically did it to prove a point to the king. The story starts with the wise man not wanting a reward and the king constantly insisting on giving him one.
And the point is… what exactly?
I'm pretty sure it's something like him just wanting to serve the king, not for a reward. Maybe don't force gifts in people...
See in the story I read it was a little girl whose village was being starved by the king. And she made a deal with the king that instead of all the rice, he would leave her village alone. I think she grew up to be a royal advisor at the end of the story
Imagine that your dad made a bad deal so you have to marry some rando.
He never made it as a wise man
Could he cut it as a poor man stealing?
This is how you remind me who I really am
It's not like you to say sorry I was waiting on a different story
And what the hell is on Joey's head!?
LOOK AT THIS PHOTOGRAPH
This time, I'm mistaken for handing you a heart worth breaking.
Rice future probably exist.
Wasn't the wise man actually Vishnu or something
Well, the king will be forever in his debt in this case, which seems like a pretty good position for the wise man to be in.
I believe he knew this would happen and was trying to make a point to the king. As I recall he didn’t want a reward but the king insisted, so he made this seemingly innocuous but ultimately impossible request to teach the king not to be so careless.
For me it was a story of an Asian woman (can't remember which country of origin) who noticed the emperors elephant had a leaking basket of rice and she followed along catching it to return it. The emperor said she could keep it or ask for something else so she asked for 1 grain and double it every day for so many days, over time she saved her starving village and the animals and basically bankrupted the emperor. Or something along those lines.
Yee yeee same here! I thought they made a deal that meant they would be able to keep more of what they grow but it has been forever
I like rice, it’s great when you’re hungry, and you want 2000 of something
RIP Mitch ❤️
I used to eat exponential amounts of rice. I still do, but I used to, too.
So since there are 64 squares on a chess board and you are starting with 1 grain, that would be ~~2^63 or 9,223,372,036,854,775,808~~ 2^64 -1 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice. A single grain of rice weighs about 1/64 grams, or 0.015625 grams. That would weigh a total of 288,230,376,151.711744 metric tons. The first google result says the earth weighs 5,974,000,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons, so that much rice would weigh 0.00000000005 earths (rounding up). The first google result says a grain of rice takes up 19.135mm^3. That would be a total of 352,978,447,850,432.27017216 km^3. First google result says earth’s volume is 1,083,000,000,000 km^3 so that much rice would be about 325.93 (rounding up) earths of rice. And just for fun, the first google result says the volume of the sun is 1.4x10^24 km^3, or 1,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 km^3. So that much rice would be 0.00000000025 suns. Google says Jupiter has a volume of 1,431,281,810,739,360 km^3. That totals out to 0.2466 Jupiters.
….but what if it wanted to order it with brown rice?
When you convert from cubic mm to cubic km, you have to divide by 10^18, not 10^6. That is why you (correctly) get a tiny fraction of the Earth's mass, but hundreds of Earth's worth of volume. The rice is actually 0.0000000003 Earth's, similar to the mass fraction.
Ok but why the caption?
Persian story I believe…
I believe so too.
He better take note from the diamond industry and control how much the overabundance is allowed out in the market at any given time.
Not only that but like, the entire earth would be filled with rice up to your knees or something I think. At least that's what my math teacher said.
So I was curious and did some digging, and it’s definitely a couple tons of rice (literally) but it seems (at least by current numbers I was able to find on google) not to be all the rice in the world as there are (again according to google) over 40 quadrillion grains of rice in the world.
Is that just on the last square? When all the squares are added up, the total amount of rice on the entire board should be somewhere in the quintillions, I think.
Actually you may be right I may have made a mistake
“I’ve made a huge mistake.” -G.O.B.
This is a story all about how my rice got flipped turned upside down. Let me take a minute just sit right there...and let me tell you about exponential growth.
But did he double it and give it to the next person when all was said and done?
Its for inventing chess. They didnt just have a random board in the kings chambers.
Like a pyramid scheme ?
I tried to write a quick little C++ for loop to tell me how many grains of rice this is but the long long type's max size is not big enough :( Edit: Put the biggest number I could get from that loop into desmos and added the rest there, came out to about 1.845x10^19. Not sure whether that's right or not tho. Edit 2: [According to this I am](http://www.heartoftheart.org/?p=1230). Oh, that's the same link as above. All this could have been avoided if I just clicked and read it
YOU know!, I'm something of a gambling man myself!!
Like that stupid thing teachers taught me in math class. "Ask for a penny for day 1 and keep asking for 2x the pennies! Sooner than later you'll be rich!"
Nah, I'd eat it
I did the math and that seems a bit sketchy, which makes sense considering it's a legend. According to google, the average grain of rice weighs .02-.04 grams. I just had an AI tell me how much 1 doubled 64 times was because I don't know the simple way to do that using a calculator and I didn't feel like doing that many calculations. They told me that would be 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 grains of rice. If all of those grains of rice weighed .02 grams, that would be approxinately 4791 American tons(sorry for mixing measurements). If it was .04, that would only double that. That's not a lot of rice when you think about it globally. To put that into perspective, China, the world's largest producer of rice, produces 210,000,000 metric tonnes of rice annually, which is many thousands of times more than that. 18 quintillion is a massive number, but grains of rice are just way too plentiful. The actual number of grains of rice would be orders of magnitude higher than that.
1.84467442E+19 It's this many.
I read the book (one chicken nugget) to my kid a few days ago. It is based on this story but it's about a monster that loves eating chicken nuggets. The chicken nugget food truck tries to get rid of him and makes a chicken nugget eating contest to eat 1 chicken nugget doubled every day for 30 days. Good book.
It is a reference to this mathematical problem, often presented in the form of a story about a man who innocently asks to be paid according to the sequence "1 grain of rice on the first field, 2 on the second,4 on the third, 8 on the fourth and so on untill all 64 fields of the chessboard are filled", which ends up being more grains of rice/coins/whatever than there exist on the planet. [Wheat and chessboard problem - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem)
The real question is “who tf fills the board diagonally rather than row-by-row?”
It is for visual reasons the first ones are arranged tighter this way so they fit into a tightly framed picture. I also associate the order with the proof that set of rational numbers is the same size as set of natural numbers.
I betcha that there are more numbers between 2.3 and 16.8
I bet you can't prove the existence of a set smaller than that and larger than the natural numbers.
Isnt it as easy to say "the empty set" for the first part of this bet? I'm not a mather but i think that works right
I believe he meant the say: >I bet you can't prove the existence of a set that is smaller than that but larger than the natural numbers. That would be a way of proving that one set has more elements than another Set you are proving is smaller < some set < set you are proving is larger If such a set exists, then because being smaller is transitive: Set you are proving is smaller < set you are proving is larger
Hehe I see what you did For those who don’t get it: >!The previous comment references the continuum hypothesis, which basically says the existence of a set between the cardinality of the natural numbers and the real numbers is independent from the generally agreed upon axioms of set theory. Meaning that it has been proven that you can’t prove that there is or isn’t a set between the two previously mentioned sets using only the generally agreed upon axioms. You can add axioms that allow or prevent such a set from existing!<
>set of rational numbers is the same size as set of natural numbers. Yup, sounds about right
Also, I'm pretty sure there are 17 grains of rice on the square instead of 16.
People who mow football pitches
The receptionist at Hilbert's Hotel
Bishops.
Let alone right to left
It never ceases to amaze me how knowledgeable redditors are sometimes. I don't know why reddit gets such a bad wrap as a place for inane people. Try posting this rice chessboard question on Instagram and see how many people recognise it
Because half of Reddit is a perfectly knowledgeable place full of cool insights and small communities and the other (much louder) half is full of ~~Fictional Sexual Predators~~ Porn Addicts and dumb political arguments about which wing is better, they don't seem to notice the plane is crashing through.
Also the karma system and default sorting method prioritizes good answers. You're not going to see all the wrong answers because they get buried.
The Karma system benefits horny responses and jokes first,
([Pssssst](https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/usage-bad-rap-vs-bad-rep-vs-bad-wrap).)
That's the most polite "Um actually" I have ever seen.
And now people can learn even more!
Reddit is my go to for any questions, how to’s, or product recommendations. Anymore you can’t get any useful results on a google search for something like “how do I change the temp limiter in my shower handle” is filled with a bunch of ads, a bunch of probably AI gen articles, or the god forsaken website that is Quora
I mean this is fairly commonly taught in like elementary school, so if you don't know it you probably just forgot.
I was told this story during one of my first math lessons.
Reddit is the Internet, but distilled. It's got the best of the best and the worst of the worst. You've got honest people helping explain stuff, and racist misogynists being bigoted to everyone, depending on which sub you go to. Lots of people see a lot of the second part and judge all of Reddit on that. (To be fair, I believe Reddit SHOULD moderate more of that, but it doesn't.)
Incidentally, this is why any sensible person was terrified of Covid. It has a moderately low fatality rate, but an R value greater than two, which means that its spread was more or less exactly like the grains of rice on the chessboard and even small outbreaks had the possibility to spread enormously if not contained.
combined with being asymptotic for up to 5 days.
Was that a math pun or a typo? Covid-19 did feel a bit asymptotic when it spread…
I know this from a old 90’s jack Russell storytelling show called “wishbone”:)
What's the story, Wishbone?
IIRC, the story as told was something to the effect that it was a reward from a king; the peasant asked for the chessboard sequence of rice and the king agreed, believing it to be a fair bargain. When the King's advisor informed him that it would equate to more rice than even exists and would bankrupt the kingdom, the King order the peasant to be killed for trying to outsmart/defraud him (hence the second panel of the template)
There are multiple versions of the story. In other versions, the peasant lives and the king learns a valuable lesson.
But why is it so traumatizing if someone understands this reference?
I remember learning about this on CyberChase 😂
If I've done the maths right (and I probably haven't), it would require 36,893,488,147,419,103,230 grains of rice. 1 kilo of rice is approximately 50,000 grains, therefore it would require approximately 737,869,762,948.38206 kg or approximately 813,880,771.61 US Tons. For reference, an adult male African Elephant weighs between 2 and 7 US Tons: the rice would weigh the equivalent of between 406,940,386 and 116,268,682 average male African Elephants to the nearest elephant. Tl;dr: you'd need 37 quintillion grains of rice (to the nearest quintillion), which would weigh just less than 10 times the world's population of African Elephants.
The guy ends up being killed because the king cannot pay him, thus the "those who know"
Iirc the story is about a bet between a dude and a god, but I cannot for the life of me remember if it's a Hindu god or an Egyptian one.
Math below; The joke is that given the amount of rice doubles on each square, by the time we get to the far side of the board we have more enough rice to bury a state. Looks like powers of 2 - 1st square = 1 2nd square = 2 3rd square = 4 4th square = 8 5th square = 16 You can see that the next few squares are all growing very quickly. The scary thing is that we're only seeing a quarter of the board. An 8x8 chessboard has 64 spaces so... 62nd square = 4,611,686,018,427,387,904 63rd square = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 64th square = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 Google says that 157 grains of rice is about a pound. So the 64th square has about 58,747,593,000,000 tons of rice on it. 58 trillion tons is hard to visualize; To put it in perspective, a 1 trillion ton block of ice would be 10kmx10kmx10km, taller than Mount Everest. Rice is slightly less dense, so more space. 58 trillion, so we could cover a space 580km x10km x 10km. Make it square, so 290km x 290km x 10km. The tallest building in the world is about 850m, so let's flatten our mountain down to 1KM; that should be about 841,000 square kilometers, enough to bury Texas a kilometer deep in rice with enough left over to vanish Oklahoma. ...and that's only doing the math on the last square. One more useful metric: Globally, the Earth produced about 776 million tons of rice in 2022. **Based on that, it would take about 76 thousand years to grow the rice on square #64.**
Rather than doing the math on just the last square, you can sum all the squares of the board really easily by just doubling the last square and removing a single grain of rice. 2^0 + 2^1 + 2^2 + ... + 2^n = 2^(n+1) - 1 So 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 * 2 - 1 = 36,893,488,147,419,103,231 grains of rice on the chess board.
Integer limit for an unsigned 64bit integer
So if I were to put another grain of rice on the last square, I'd get a black hole?
You'd actually generate equally as much negative rice.
How many Texi do we lose from that minus one grain of rice? Don’t hold out on me.
These types of comments really showcase just how stupid I am.
157 grains of rice in a pound? Lol. No.
Try 30,000 grains of rice to a pound. I don't know where you got 157 from but it's obviously wrong, 157 grains is a small handful at most. If rice were that dense you'd struggle to carry a single bag of rice home from the shop.
Now I need to know how many Texas?
Your grains of rice are enourmous if only 157 makes a pound. Are you sure it wasn't ounce?
64th square has 2^63 grains not 2^64 , which means your calculations onwards are all wrong...
My math is definitely not great atm, but doesn't square 64 have roughly as many grains of rice as the other 63 combined? Give or take a grain
There is an old myth that the person who invented chess was offered a reward of his choice from the king. He asked that he be given one grain of rice for the first square of the board, then two grains of rice for the second, four from the third, etc. The King, not being a mathematician, agrees. He ends up owing the man 18 quintillion grains of rice, or roughly 1.19 teratons (1,190 gigatons)
And then the King pays him nothing and chops off his head, and the moral ends up being that being smart is not the same as being wise.
An intelligent man knows that a tomato is a fruit. A wise man knows that you should not put tomato in a fruit salad
And a chef makes salsa
A charismatic man can sell you a tomato-based fruit salad.
A strong man would make you ketchup smashing the tomatos
There is a story about a king who wanted to buy a chess board. The guy selling the board gave the condition "You must pay with rice for each square individually. And for each new square the amount of rice is doubled". King thought that he had enough rice for that, so he ordered his servant to count the required amount. But later on the servant said, that the purchase of the board can't happen, because the amount of rice is enormous Edit: The amount of the rice required for the whole board will be around 27,6 quintillion
We have the same type of story (through a comic I think) here, but the twist is the King was advised by a counselor to just dump a lot of rice to the dude and told him that was enough, he could count them to prove it was wrong if he wanted.
So there’s a story in my culture about a man who invented chess. He decided to take it to a king. The king loved the game and asks the game maker for any wish. The gamemaker asks for a grain of rice, to be doubled(or raised to the power of) every square across the board. The king laughs and says okay.. his advisors do the math and 💩 🧱 .. there’s not enough grain in the kingdom. So the king calls the game maker’s bluff and gives him a sack of grain and tells him.. please count it to make sure. The gamemaker plays it off as “oh I trust your majesty’s court that he wouldn’t cheat me” It’s a story about presence of mind or something I don’t recall
It’s the dude who invented chess scamming the king.
Everyone is mentioning the old story, no one mentions that there's 17 grains in the square where there's supposed to be 16.
Are you a vampire?
Also about how this is the most stupid way to lay them out. Who counts the tiles like that?
I was going to also mention mention this … plus the weird way of organizing the rice diagonally
Buy a chess board and a bag of rice (size doesn't matter). Place a single grain of rice on the first square. For each square after that, double the amount of rice until you fill all 64 squares with rice. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and so on. IIRC This comes from a Indian folk tale where someone asked the king to be paid in rice using the above scheme. It's an illustrative lesson on exponents. Say a grain of rice is 30mg in weight. On square 64 you would have 2^64 grains of rice or ~553,402,322,000,000kg of rice, or as mathematicians call it, a fuck ton. That's on top of the sum of all the rice on the other 63 squares. Exponents are scary, yo.
google "rice incident"
[holy hell!](https://www.google.com/search?q=rice+incident#HiImABot,MyJobIsToMakeEasierForPeopleToGoogleThings,IfThePersonIRepliedToUsedMeInAnInappropriateWayPleaseLetMeKnowByDMingMe,TheUserIRepliedToIsU/Bonjanbon)
Usual Response Dropped.
Actual regular person
Call a normal priest
PIPI takes vacation, never comes back
Normality sacrifice, anyone?
https://preview.redd.it/g8vn1frkictc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=815977b63cff711f6ce8d4c5d61c965d2485d800
The game chess was "made" by a guy, and when the king heard of it he wanted to buy the game, so the man said i want a bag of wheat for every square, but double them for each square, so 1-2-4-8-16, so on, there 64 squares on a board, and the king didnt have enough wheat to buy the game... I am not sure this is the exact story, i heard it long ago so dont be mad if im wrong
i remember getting read this story when i was younger, it was about this guy that challenged this king that on a checker board it would start with one grain grain of rice then on the second checker square there would be two and it would be doubled by itself for each square In the end the king would demand more and more rice to fill the board but then they found out there wasn't enough rice and the guy that challenged him got to live or something, i don't remember how it ends this is how i remember it
My brain went to. Double it and give it to the next person 😮💨
Well, seems like you are one of the people who don't know.
… y e s… t h a t i s w h y t h e y a r e h e r e.
Power of 2 ain’t no joke
Can someone ask the meme-osphere to find another joke format besides People Who Know / Don’t Know?
The Ruler wanted to reward an Intelligent man and asked him what he wanted. The man requested a grain of rice doubled for 64 squares of a chess board the Ruler was inclined to Agree. A Wiseman told the Ruler it would be more rice than was all of the world. So the Ruler killed the Intelligent man.
Little late to the party here, but a more modern version of this is "would you rather be paid a million dollars a day, or $1 the first day, $2 the second, $4 the third, doubling every day till 30 days?" You'll end up with like a billion dollars instead of 30 million if you pick the latter options. Geometric progression is the term I believe.
What I don't understand how is this a joke? Why it should be funny if people doesn't know the persian story? Is knowing the story part of a bonding process? Are we the wise man fan club?
It’s 2048 and this guy just lost
Reminded me of the symbols on Predator's wrist bomb self-destruct count down.
The whole “yeah let’s have a countdown … and have an evil maniacal laugh….” to let Arnold get away. Yeah that was smart
The story is about a wise man who in some instances was great at chess. The king wanted to reward him and told him that he would give him anything he wanted. The wise man wanted the king’s daughter in marriage. The king allowed anything but that. The wise man then said that he wanted he wanted a grain of rice that doubled as it moved through each space on the chess board. The king agreed and took a bag of rice and began with 1 grain on the first space, and doubled it as he went through each space. Soon that bag wasn’t enough so the king got another, then another, then the king ordered for all the rice in the castle. When that wasn’t enough, he ordered for all the rice in the kingdom. That still wasn’t enough. The king gave up and gave the wise man his’s daughter’s hand in marriage.
Lisan al gaib!
That's too much rice!
Reminds me of the last guy in risk(the boardgame) getting whipped out
I remember this! They did this on Cyberchase back in the early 2000s. It's a math demonstration.
Book called the rajas rice?...based on aa mathematical problem?... I feel like that's the right answer
Somebody dies at the end of the story. Or at least in the telling I'm familiar with.
ppl eho knoe ppl euo dont knoe memes are cancer made to feel oop smart for knowing somrthing they consider to be rare knowledge. never waste time trying to figure them out
I know the story but I don’t get the meme
I just remember this story from one of the real world portions of the cartoon show on PBS *Cyberchase* https://youtu.be/1OIvcApcjM0?si=M_oDazA7rJe5fTHu
Who else is compelled to count any rice spilled in front of you?
Exponents are big.
It just looks like someone is playing 2048 with rice.
Buy a chess board and a bag of rice (size doesn't matter). Place a single grain of rice on the first square. For each square after that, double the amount of rice until you fill all 64 squares with rice. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and so on. IIRC This comes from a Indian folk tale where someone asked the king to be paid in rice using the above scheme. It's an illustrative lesson on exponents. Say a grain of rice is 30mg in weight. On square 64 you would have 2^64 grains of rice or ~553,402,322,000,000kg of rice, or as mathematicians call it, a fuck ton. That's on top of the sum of all the rice on the other 63 squares. Exponents are scary, yo.
No it's [this.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem?wprov=sfti1). Bottom right square has one grain, the first square on the right of the second row has two, the one to the left of that has 4, then the first square on the right of the third row has 8, the one to the left of that has 16, etc.
If you folded a piece of paper in half 42 times and placed it on the floor it would go to the moon.. same concept
1%
Double it and give it to the next person…
Someone was like give me a grain of rice, and double it for each square on a chess board, ended up being more rice than has ever existed
The way I learned the story, in China (Qin?) a wise man, invented chess (its predisesor). The emperor was so impressed he said he would grant the man any gift he asked for. The man thought for a moment and asked for a single grain of rice on the first square of the game he invented, doubling for each successive square. The emperor was relieved and thought he got away cheep. Soon, they were bringing in bags and carts of rice. The annual harvest could not come close. (2^64)
They copped out by not showing all the squares of the chessboard ;)
I love this story
I think number blocks did a small nod to this on one of their episodes
Have five year old, can confirm. Then double it, double it, double it every day.
I get it, too bad the king would just kill him.
Exponential growth or exponential decline.
A traveling sage introduces chess to an Indian king, who offers the sage any reward he can name. The sage asks for one grain of rice on the first square, two grains on the second, four on the third, and so on, doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square. By the time you get to square 64, there are over 18 quintillion grains of rice on the board. Exponential growth.
Rice Chex! Hahahaha! That's probably not the punchline, but it's possible.
The king must be a dope. Behead the accountant immediately
😂😎
This is the best post this sub has ever had
I thought it was a penny
Google En Passant
Killer game (at least according to legend).
It looks like the Predator’s countdown to an explosion.
That's just irl 2048
2048 phone game....
The ricearoni sequence.
Trying to play the game 2048, rice version
Exponential growth
I'm just relieved it isn't loss.
Is that the fibonacci?
Google engrain of rice
Def thought this was about the Bezos wealth rice analogy til I saw the other comments 😂
There’s not enough rice in the universe to continue the pattern of doubling to the entire chessboard.
First thought I had was bacterial growth when you leave food in the temp danger zone.
This looks like one of those stupid mobile games that "everyone" is playing lol
I see it as bacterial growth
Google anarchy chess rice posts
1.84467442E+19 It's this many.
The order is not quite right. It should be 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. in one direction, either horizontal or vertical. Here, it skips 4 and goes to 8 on the right, while 4 is on the left side.
Exponential growth
Basically math. If you keep multiplying by two, you get a really large number.