Rice and Chessboard Problem
This is one variation of a famous, and likely apocryphal, story of the origin of chess:
The King of Hind commissioned a peasant or minister to create a strategy game of surpassing quality. Pleased with the result, the king asked the inventor to name his price. The inventor gave the king a choice, his own weight in gold, or, the king could put one grain of rice on the first square of the board, two on the second, 4 on the third, and keep on doubling the number of grains for every one of the 64 squares. The king hastily chose the second option. Somewhere around square 32, he came to a realization that there was not enough rice in the kingdom. Upon realizing that he could not possibly pay the debt, the king chose to kill the inventor.
The first half of the chessboard would have represented some 100 tonnes of rice, while the second half would have required 460 billion tonnes, some six times the mass of all life on Earth.
Read more about this topic: List Of Chess-related Deaths
Famous quotes containing the words rice and, rice and/or problem:
“Rice and peas fit into that category of dishes where two ordinary foods, combined together, ignite a pleasure far beyond the capacity of either of its parts alone. Like rhubarb and strawberries, apple pie and cheese, roast pork and sage, the two tastes and textures meld together into the sort of subtle transcendental oneness that we once fantasized would be our experience when we finally found the ideal mate.”
—John Thorne, U.S. cookbook writer. Simple Cooking, “Rice and Peas: A Preface with Recipes,” Viking Penguin (1987)
“The arbitrary division of one’s life into weeks and days and hours seemed, on the whole, useless. There was but one day for the men, and that was pay day, and one for the women, and that was rent day. As for the children, every day was theirs, just as it should be in every corner of the world.”
—Alice Caldwell Rice (1870–1942)
“The general public is easy. You don’t have to answer to anyone; and as long as you follow the rules of your profession, you needn’t worry about the consequences. But the problem with the powerful and rich is that when they are sick, they really want their doctors to cure them.”
—Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673)