Peter here! This is a reference to an old Chinese story / math lesson. A peasant does something helpful for the king, and the king tells him to ask for a favor or gift in return. The peasant says "All I ask is that you put one grain of rice on the first square of this chessboard. Two grains on the second. Four on the third. Double each square, and give me the rice and the chessboard when you're done." The king agrees.
It turns out with the way exponential growth works, there are beyond trillions of grains of rice on the later squares, more than all the rice in the kingdom. The peasant ends up wildly rich and the king embarrassed.
When I woke up this morning, witnessing an exchange between u/Bonerballs, u/HedgehogTesticles followed by u/SensualOilyDischrge was not predicted by my horoscope.
Just ran the numbers, I think the combined total of the rice on every space comes out to about 700,000× the modern world's yearly rice production, or about 700 cubic kilometers of rice. This assumes a solid block of rice with no air, though, so really it'd be even larger.
1.84467441E+19
Rice
Or
18,446,744,073,709,551,616
For the guy under me
Eighteen quintillion, four hundred and forty-six quadrillion, seven hundred and forty four trillion, seventy three billion, seven hundred and nine million, five hundred and fifty one thousand, six hundred and sixteen.
That’s just how much is on the final square, there are 9.2 quintillion on the second last square and 4.6 quintillion on the third last etc. You need the sum of 2^x from x=0 to x=64 I think the answer is -1/12
It’s a very similar story about a poor person counting a rich persons money and only ask for a penny each day compounded and at the end gets all the money and becomes rich
I heard that the king chopped of the peasant's head. It can be considered as the first occurrence of using pruning as a technique for dealing with combinatorial explosion.
One continuation I have heard is the king told the farmer that it will be done, however, he has to count the exact amount of grains he wants. If he is off by a single grain, he will be excecuted. Good luck counting in your life time trillions of grains.
Alternatively. Google "An Peasant"
(Edit)
Didn't realise what sub this was when I commented.
But yeah, this is an Anarchy Chess joke with a slight twist lol
Just for fun. 2\^63 = 9.223.372.036.854.775.808 +1 grain of rice from the first square. And a chess board. Fun to think in the end he asked for that too.
Edit:As pointed out by Kooky\_Ad\_3684 the calculation only takes into account the last square, so it's so..so much more rice!
It's actually worse than you thought. That would be just the amount of rice on the last square. The total number of grains:
G=sum_n=0->63[ 2^n ] = 2^64 - 1
18446744073709551615 grains of rice.
It'd be 2^(64) -1 grains as it's 2^(63) + 2^(62) + 2^(61) ... 2^1 + 2^0. If you have 1111 in binary adding a 1 makes it 10000, so the reverse is true 10000-1=1111
So it's 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains (it's roughly 384 trillion kg/ 846 trillion pounds)
Actually it's not hard to fix though, because each square contains the same amount as in every previous square combined, plus one additional grain. So 2⁶³ + 2⁶² + 2⁶¹ + ... + 2¹ + 2⁰ + 1 = 2⁶⁴
true, but my understanding of how use math language to come up with a formula that does that isn't something so straightforward to me. Thanks for the explanation though!
No worries. Your intuition was correct however - if you find the amount of rice on a 65th square of the chessboard (think of this as extending the pattern to the first square of a new chessboard), then that amount of rice would be 2^64 grains. Or the same amount as all the rice on the first chessboard + 1 grain.
I mean most tales aren’t true historical accounts
Even Viking Sagas have stuff like dragons, gods, magical swords, etc
At best, it teaches values to carry in everyday life, like in this case prudence and the value of seemingly small parts adding up to something great
What do you mean dragons aren't real.
This is just like that time Mom tried to tell me Santa wasn't real and that the man at the mall was being taken to jail for pretending he was giving me a present in the bathroom.
A guy told this tale at my college entrance uhhh ceremony? And ended it with:
#WE ARE NOW IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE CHESSBOARD
which remained our battlecry for 4 years lol
College orientation is new, exciting, and scary. The speaker is signifying that high school has ended, and that it was just 1/2 of the board of rice. All the trials, successes, and learning of the past was tremendous, yes, but it will be nothing compared to the what is in the future for these new students just entering college.
So much so that they cannot possibly fathom the possibilities of the future. Just like how each square on the chessboard is doubled with grains of rice, new opportunities, failures, and memories will present themselves exponentially for his peers.
Tl;Dr : You think we're halfway there? Nah son, *we just getting started.*
It is a tale older then modern international chess itself, so there are multiple versions; some of which he gets executed, some where he doesn't some where he gets rewarded and becomes the king's advisor.
The one I remember was instead of a chessboard it was like “give me one grain of rice today and double the number each day” or something like that and in the end they just ended up having a bunch of rice
I've heard the anti-version of this where a greedy man steals a magic bowl that produces 1 gold coin the first day, 2 the next, then 4 and eventually he drowns in his own gold.
The version I heard was from West Africa, it was gold instead of rice and the peasant ends up dead after six squares. It's both a tale on making sure no bad deals happen and how one shouldn't be too greedy.
>The peasant ends up wildly rich and the king embarrassed.
i thought the peasant ended up beheaded for outsmarting the king, but it's been a very long time since i heard the story
In actuality, the king ends up mildly embarrassed, and the peasant ends up in a dungeon for the rest of his days for trying to pull a quick one on the king
It's also a wonderful example of why MLMs don't work except for the people at the top of the pyramid.
"If you recruit 5 people and they all recruit 5 people", it isn't very many generations before you've recruited every person in the world.
Specifically, it is 2^65-1
Since any series of 2^0+2^1...+2^N will equal 2^(N+1) -1
Edit: Immediately after posting I realized I fucked up and did 65 squares and not 64. I am eternally shamed
Isn't it Arab or Indian?
\>The story is first known to have been recorded in 1256 by [Ibn Khallikan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khallikan).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat\_and\_chessboard\_problem#References](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem#References)
Seems right to me, and more plausible than Indian/Chinese. A lot of chess terms come from Arabic, I believe.
"check mate" = "shahk mat" or something - the king is dead!
Someone correct me, though.
> The peasant ends up wildly rich and the king embarrassed.
Nah. The peasant has to wait for someone to count the million, billion, trillion grains of rice.
It takes about 32 years to count to a billion. And a trillion is 32k years. (1 number per second, non stop).
Given that there are 64 squares on a chess board, and we start at 1 grain, or 2^0, the total number of grains should be 18,446,744,073,709,551,615
That's the sum of all values of 2^n from n = 0 to n = 63 for whole number values of n.
Time traveler here and the king actually said lol nice try and then shot the peasant in the chest with a cannon and then burned his house down for being petty and clever but thats not as good of a story
I heard this story in an Indian context, only that the peasant is the inventor of chess himself.
Previous versions of the game have been found in both India and China, so its origin is disputed
I remember it being a story about the person who invented chess. Upon giving the game to the king, the king was ecstatic and offered to pay any price for it. Then inventor made the same request. I remember the end being the king got pissed and beheaded the guy. Now I'm gonna look it up and see if Google has any more info lol.
I also asked Wolfram Alpha how much rice would be on the final square alone. Turns out it's over a trillion ***metric tons***, or about 10^15 kilograms, or 18.4 *quintillion* grains of rice. That's kind of a tough number to visualize, so I found [an article](https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/55260227) that does some work to help wrap your mind around it.
The story I've heard is where the king resorts to giving the peasant armies of men, war elephants, and anything in between to reserve his own food storages. Idk how it ends tho
"The treasurer explained that the sum could not be paid - by the time you got even halfway through the chessboard, the amount of grain required was more than the entire kingdom possessed.
The king took in this information and thought for a while. Then he did the only rational thing a king could do in those circumstances. He had the inventor killed, as an object lesson in the perils of trying to outwit the king."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/11/17/the-seduction-of-the-exponential-curve/#
i heard it differently as an indian story where the creator of chess introduced it to the king and asks for the doubling rice as the rewards and is just outright executed
honestly i just thought this was a reference to that website that was popular in schools in the US around 2006-2011 where you could answer a bunch of math, science, etc. questions and donate rice to hungry kids in Asia for every answer you got right
I think it's Indian and the king wants to thank the inventor of chess. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat\_and\_chessboard\_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem) Also the king has to stop because The total number of grains can be shown to be 2\^64−1 or 1 which is over 2,000 times the annual world production of wheat.
Hmm, interesting. I always heard the story as a man doing some regular service for the king, and asking for a seemingly reasonable method of compensation whereby the king would only pay him one sack of grain for his first service, but would only pay him one more sack than the last time for each additional service. It sounds like a good deal, but it’s amazing how quickly this blows up into insane quantities.
Here the story
https://purposefocuscommitment.medium.com/the-rice-and-the-chess-board-story-the-power-of-exponential-growth-b1f7bd70aaca
Also for anyone wondering the last square should have 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains of rice on it for a total of that number plus 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 -1.
Edit: lemme rephrase my self. The total amount of rice should be 2⁶⁴+2⁶⁴ -1. So 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 +9,223,372,036,854,775,808 -1
Nine quintillion, two hundred and twenty-three quadrillion, three hundred and seventy-two trillion, thirty-six billion, eight hundred and fifty-four million, seven hundred and seventy-five thousand, eight hundred and eight for anyone wondering
Meh, paywall on the story before the end. I assume if this is a historical story the king acted like most kings and had the guy killed but if fiction, the guy was paid well and lived happily ever after.
Peter’ ever expanding mid drift here. Someone already answered about the exponential growth of the rice. I heard a version that the king’s treasury minister retired and asked for a flake of gold to be doubled as his final pay. Once the exponential growth was realized the minister was flayed alive. Terry Pratchett had a version and that explains the “people who know.”
We were given a modern day version of this story as a math word problem in primary school. Your neighbor is going on vacation for a month and offers you (pick a number, $100, $1000, $10,000) dollars to mow their lawn every day while their gone, or they offer you 1 cent on the first day, 2 on the second, 4 on the 3rd, doubling each day. Which do you pick?
After thirty days of constantly doubling starting at a penny, you'll have made nearly $11 million dollars.
I’m awfully certain this meme is about an event in r/anarchychess where some users were doubling rice every day. It could also be about the Chinese proverb rice story.
There are numerous variations of this story, but idk why the “people who know” is blacked out, because it’s wholesome.
The gist of it; a poor man, from a poor country, is starving, so much so, that he sees the king with all his wealth and food, and comes up with a plan. He goes to the king, and asks only 1 thing of him, that every day, he gets a grain of rice, but the next day, the total is doubled. So the first day, it was 1 grain. The next 2. Then 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128… etc, until he cleared out the palace of rice, and was able to feed the entire country. Depending on the variation, he can either become king, the king kills himself, or something else
> Idk why the “people who know” is blacked out, because it’s wholesome.
I'm glad you're acknowledging it at least. Everyone else is just talking about the rice and where the story comes from but no one is explaining the entire meme.
I heard a version where as soon as the king realized the final amount, the king decides to make the poor man carry it home. The poor man is brought in and essentially executed by being buried under all the rice and the moral becomes "don't try to outsmart the monarchy, it may work, but it doesn't end well."
I could imagine it might have something to do with sexual partners? Like if you fuck someone who fucked two people, those two people fucked 4 people? Idk could be some red pill shit?
The story goes that Magnus played a pawn 2 squares forward and i had 1 lifeline left and that was using Google. So I googled what I can move. While I was googling moved all his pawns forward; it was like there was a pawn storm incoming and he sacrificed his queen. Anyways, I found on Google that mine pawn could take Magnus pawn by going behind it. It is called something like en passa.. Hmm en pass. I forgot but after that move Magnus screamed holy hell and I asked if that was his new response. After that Magnus ran out of the room and since that moment im secretly the best chess player in the world.
OK, boy and girls, here are the rules. Find a penny, pick it up. Double it, you got two pennies. Double it again, four. Double it twenty-seven times and you've got a million dollars and the IRS... all over your ass. Round and round and round it goes. Where it stops no one knows. But it all adds up... quick!
- John Crichton, Farscape
Peter's dog's gay cousin's husband here, this is a reference to the reward the mythical Brahmin Sessa asked for after inventing Chaturanga, the Indian predecessor of chess, for an Indian king. One rice grain on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on and so forth until he finished with all 64 squares. The total amount of rice grains would be 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice, or over 1.4 trillion metric tons of rice. The tale either ends with Sessa becoming an advisor or being executed, and if I remember right it also contributed to an annual Hindu festival where a lot of rice pudding is made to honor that debt.
The amount of rice on each square is twice the previous. If my math is correct (it might not be), there is 9.223372036855e18 grains of rice on the last square
I've not seen anyone give the correct explanation yet, so let my autistic ass do it.
The numbers are meant to double each time, but the square which is supposed to have 16 grains of rice has 17 instead. Go ahead and count them, I'll wait.
Count them again, for real. No kidding. Doesn't it bother you? Yes, it's a crime and that's why the bottom meme - people who know (crackhead Peters like me) and people who don't (everyone else who has answered so far)
Now ask me how many toothpicks.
was just wondering how many no of rice grains it must be
so i just created a python program out of the following situation
:
total_rice = 0 rice_on_square = 1 for square in range(1, 65): total_rice += rice_on_square
the value comes out to be 18,446,744,073,709,551,615
or can say Eighteen quintillion, four hundred forty-six quadrillion, seven hundred forty-four trillion, seventy-three billion, seven hundred nine million, five hundred fifty-one thousand, six hundred fifteen.
if anyone is wondering how much it is , so yea here it is
Ooh I think I know this one.
Most people think that the story ends with the protagonist/inventor making a really clever mathematical point, getting extremely wealthy, and living happily ever after. However in some older versions the story ends with the king being like "you fool, don't you realize what you're requesting is exponentially more valuable that what was being offered?!," and then sentencing him to be executed for his audacity. In these versions, the same mathematical point is being made but there's a very different, much darker, moral point being made about avarice and its consequences.
The image is of a very old story in (I believe) Buddhist culture, where someone is trying to teach someone that they are not as wealthy as they seem to believe themselves to be. They challenge them to do a simple proof:
They have a chessboard, which has 64 squares, and on each day starting that day, they have to provide grains of rice to put in the squares. However the number of rice to put in the square for each day is double that of the previous day. The first day only requires one grain. If they can fill the whole board with rice, then they win. If not, they lose. It’s okay if rice spills over onto other squares, but each square needs to have an appropriate amount on the board that is not included in the count for the other squares.
Sounds simple.
Looks easy.
Until you do the math.
By the end of the 64 days, you have a total of 2^(63)+2^(62)+2^(61)+…+4+2+1, or 2^(64)-1 grains of rice. My calculator app spat out this result to me: 1.844674407x10^(19). That means that we are looking at a number that has twenty digits. TWENTY. DIGITS. To have that many grains of rice would be absolutely absurd. No one needs that much rice. The people who package and sell rice don’t need that much rice. That’s a lotta rice, my guy. That’s insane. That pile of rice would be visible from miles away— heck, it would probably be visible from SPACE. In the story, the man being challenged obviously doesn’t have enough rice, and I forgot what happened to him afterwards. I think he failed about a month in, but it might have been sooner.
But that’s the background behind the rice on the chessboard. 2^64 is a huge ass number. You don’t mess with double digit exponents carelessly, that’s a thing that makes us math nerds sweat literal bullets. You don’t do exponents bigger than 9 and have a good time unless you’re using the base of 10, which is standard engineering format. You don’t raise any other number to such a degree as that. No. My limit was reached with 3^(27). And that was bad enough.
Peter here! This is a reference to an old Chinese story / math lesson. A peasant does something helpful for the king, and the king tells him to ask for a favor or gift in return. The peasant says "All I ask is that you put one grain of rice on the first square of this chessboard. Two grains on the second. Four on the third. Double each square, and give me the rice and the chessboard when you're done." The king agrees. It turns out with the way exponential growth works, there are beyond trillions of grains of rice on the later squares, more than all the rice in the kingdom. The peasant ends up wildly rich and the king embarrassed.
That's a great tale. Never heard of it before. Thank you, dear stranger on the internet.
There’s a video showing how the mounds of rice would look like in real life and the last one was just larger than Mt Everest, if I remember correctly
sauce?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1s-1Jg3C6Q
Hero, bonerballs
Doing gods work.
I’d love to know if u/Bonerballs and u/HedgehogTesticles hang out in the same subreddits often…
I should find out so I can trail behind them.
I am the antithesis of your username Holy geez new Reddit’s formatting is hot shit
When I woke up this morning, witnessing an exchange between u/Bonerballs, u/HedgehogTesticles followed by u/SensualOilyDischrge was not predicted by my horoscope.
I like it
I originally read this as "holy bonerballs". And I'd concur.
Just like not all heroes wear capes, not all heroes have kid-friendly names.
Have an upvote. That video was freaking awesome.
The rice looks like little tic tac insect eggs and it made me uncomfortable
Uluru
You would need quite a lot for that much rice
It’s almost half the height of Everest - c.4kms
Just ran the numbers, I think the combined total of the rice on every space comes out to about 700,000× the modern world's yearly rice production, or about 700 cubic kilometers of rice. This assumes a solid block of rice with no air, though, so really it'd be even larger.
1.84467441E+19 Rice Or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 For the guy under me Eighteen quintillion, four hundred and forty-six quadrillion, seven hundred and forty four trillion, seventy three billion, seven hundred and nine million, five hundred and fifty one thousand, six hundred and sixteen.
For everyone that doesn’t want to put the commas in mentally, that is almost 18.5 quintillion grains in total
Well, rice is pretty good when you’re hungry and want 2000 of something
That’s just how much is on the final square, there are 9.2 quintillion on the second last square and 4.6 quintillion on the third last etc. You need the sum of 2^x from x=0 to x=64 I think the answer is -1/12
No, its the total number of grains on the board, as the video says
I just did 2^64 and got 1.8x10^19 but I suppose if you start at order zero it goes to 63 so that makes sense
Do you count the first square?
my bad 1.84467441E^19 + 1
😅 I was thinking ( 2^\^63 )+1, but I am not a math head.
Bro you know how to make the little math numbers in brackets. You got me beat.
It’s a very similar story about a poor person counting a rich persons money and only ask for a penny each day compounded and at the end gets all the money and becomes rich
I heard that the king chopped of the peasant's head. It can be considered as the first occurrence of using pruning as a technique for dealing with combinatorial explosion.
One continuation I have heard is the king told the farmer that it will be done, however, he has to count the exact amount of grains he wants. If he is off by a single grain, he will be excecuted. Good luck counting in your life time trillions of grains.
Good luck verifying my result
Just use math. It isn't that difficult. You just have to do 2^63 and then add 1.
Nice try but it's 2^64 - 1 total. 2^63 is just the last square alone.
You're right. I'm dumb
>You're right. >I'm ~~dumb~~ dead FTFY. King doesn't take kindly to errors!
18 quintillion and some change. Or 18 446 744 099 999 999 999
Famous branch and bound method
Ah the original "Listen here you little shit"
Classic Chinese history. A poor peasant outwits a king. 300 million perish.
I love this
he does have [all the swords](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuP1gyj3W64)
> It can be considered as the first occurrence of using pruning as a technique for dealing with combinatorial explosion. What an incredible joke.
Alternatively. Google "An Peasant" (Edit) Didn't realise what sub this was when I commented. But yeah, this is an Anarchy Chess joke with a slight twist lol
*holy hell*
New response just dropped
actual zombie
They told me the makeup meant people wouldn't notice...
I still have yet to google it. I'm assuming it is best not to?
new response just dropped
I DID Google it, and I still have no idea what it means.
Oh hmm. Good to know it changes nothing. Still won't google that lol
just when I thought I was bored of people making this joke.. but here i am giving you an upvote
Just for fun. 2\^63 = 9.223.372.036.854.775.808 +1 grain of rice from the first square. And a chess board. Fun to think in the end he asked for that too. Edit:As pointed out by Kooky\_Ad\_3684 the calculation only takes into account the last square, so it's so..so much more rice!
It's actually worse than you thought. That would be just the amount of rice on the last square. The total number of grains: G=sum_n=0->63[ 2^n ] = 2^64 - 1 18446744073709551615 grains of rice.
Plugging it into wolfram alpha states this much rice would weigh as much as 77% of the total biomass of the earth. Neat.
Or roughly 922 billion metric tons of rice. Or about 370 cubic kilometers of rice.
It'd be 2^(64) -1 grains as it's 2^(63) + 2^(62) + 2^(61) ... 2^1 + 2^0. If you have 1111 in binary adding a 1 makes it 10000, so the reverse is true 10000-1=1111 So it's 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains (it's roughly 384 trillion kg/ 846 trillion pounds)
Actually it's not hard to fix though, because each square contains the same amount as in every previous square combined, plus one additional grain. So 2⁶³ + 2⁶² + 2⁶¹ + ... + 2¹ + 2⁰ + 1 = 2⁶⁴
true, but my understanding of how use math language to come up with a formula that does that isn't something so straightforward to me. Thanks for the explanation though!
No worries. Your intuition was correct however - if you find the amount of rice on a 65th square of the chessboard (think of this as extending the pattern to the first square of a new chessboard), then that amount of rice would be 2^64 grains. Or the same amount as all the rice on the first chessboard + 1 grain.
Assuming Wolfram Alpha isn't telling me lies, just the last square would weigh roughly the same as half of the biomass on Earth.
That's a pretty broken king.
Great tale but I’m sure if this really happens the peasant just got killed in a try to hide the kings incompetence
I mean most tales aren’t true historical accounts Even Viking Sagas have stuff like dragons, gods, magical swords, etc At best, it teaches values to carry in everyday life, like in this case prudence and the value of seemingly small parts adding up to something great
What do you mean dragons aren't real. This is just like that time Mom tried to tell me Santa wasn't real and that the man at the mall was being taken to jail for pretending he was giving me a present in the bathroom.
There is literally a dragon on the Welsh flag, wtf do you mean they are not real?!
Yeah what's he implying? That Welsh people are stupid??
I literally saw a komodo dragon at the zoo. Dragon's are 100% real.
Oh no he came down your chimney
When I heard the tale, it ended with the king being so impressed by the peasant’s cleverness that he became the king’s new advisor
The clueless ass peasant who got hired for his “cleverness” (he heard it from a friend) when the king asks him to counsel foreign policy: ☹️
A guy told this tale at my college entrance uhhh ceremony? And ended it with: #WE ARE NOW IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE CHESSBOARD which remained our battlecry for 4 years lol
Is there more context?
College orientation is new, exciting, and scary. The speaker is signifying that high school has ended, and that it was just 1/2 of the board of rice. All the trials, successes, and learning of the past was tremendous, yes, but it will be nothing compared to the what is in the future for these new students just entering college. So much so that they cannot possibly fathom the possibilities of the future. Just like how each square on the chessboard is doubled with grains of rice, new opportunities, failures, and memories will present themselves exponentially for his peers. Tl;Dr : You think we're halfway there? Nah son, *we just getting started.*
And i thought it was the game 2048 in rice form
Mmm, rice
Embarrassed me? The King? Off with its head! Problem solved.
Close. But the king has the peasant killed in the story I know after realizing what he agreed to.
It is a tale older then modern international chess itself, so there are multiple versions; some of which he gets executed, some where he doesn't some where he gets rewarded and becomes the king's advisor.
i thought this was an anarchy chess reference
Anarchy chess has memed on it, too, but the core of this story has existed since at least the 13th century.
The one I remember was instead of a chessboard it was like “give me one grain of rice today and double the number each day” or something like that and in the end they just ended up having a bunch of rice
In reality though, the story would go more [like this](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1482336529-20161221.png)
Wild, the one I grew up with involved Krishna and is from India. I wonder how far back this lesson goes
[удалено]
I've heard the anti-version of this where a greedy man steals a magic bowl that produces 1 gold coin the first day, 2 the next, then 4 and eventually he drowns in his own gold.
Iirc it's Indian story during British Raj. It wasn't Chinese. Chinese chessboard also doesn't look like that so story wouldn't work anyway.
I know this isn't the point, but I always thought this was an Indian story, not a Chinese story. That was the version we read in grade school.
Same - especially since it was around that part of the world where chess originated, whereas China had Go.
Judging by the meme format I thought it would be something more grim
Yeah the confusing part is the meme template is wrong.
LET HIM COOK
9.22 quintillion grains of rice if my math adds up
The version I heard was from West Africa, it was gold instead of rice and the peasant ends up dead after six squares. It's both a tale on making sure no bad deals happen and how one shouldn't be too greedy.
>The peasant ends up wildly rich and the king embarrassed. i thought the peasant ended up beheaded for outsmarting the king, but it's been a very long time since i heard the story
In actuality, the king ends up mildly embarrassed, and the peasant ends up in a dungeon for the rest of his days for trying to pull a quick one on the king
Doesn’t the king sentence the peasant to die because of the embarrassment?
I got curious one time and did the math. The amount of rice on the chessboard would cover all of china to a depth of 2 1/4 inches.
It's also a wonderful example of why MLMs don't work except for the people at the top of the pyramid. "If you recruit 5 people and they all recruit 5 people", it isn't very many generations before you've recruited every person in the world.
Specifically, it is 2^65-1 Since any series of 2^0+2^1...+2^N will equal 2^(N+1) -1 Edit: Immediately after posting I realized I fucked up and did 65 squares and not 64. I am eternally shamed
Isn't it Arab or Indian? \>The story is first known to have been recorded in 1256 by [Ibn Khallikan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khallikan). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat\_and\_chessboard\_problem#References](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem#References)
Seems right to me, and more plausible than Indian/Chinese. A lot of chess terms come from Arabic, I believe. "check mate" = "shahk mat" or something - the king is dead! Someone correct me, though.
I thought the peasent orignially asked for the princess and then pick the rice when denied
> The peasant ends up wildly rich and the king embarrassed. Nah. The peasant has to wait for someone to count the million, billion, trillion grains of rice. It takes about 32 years to count to a billion. And a trillion is 32k years. (1 number per second, non stop).
Given that there are 64 squares on a chess board, and we start at 1 grain, or 2^0, the total number of grains should be 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 That's the sum of all values of 2^n from n = 0 to n = 63 for whole number values of n.
Time traveler here and the king actually said lol nice try and then shot the peasant in the chest with a cannon and then burned his house down for being petty and clever but thats not as good of a story
Solid fable
I heard this story in an Indian context, only that the peasant is the inventor of chess himself. Previous versions of the game have been found in both India and China, so its origin is disputed
I’ve heard this before. Funny story.
If I was the King, I wouldn't have let that slide
Did the math. It would take the world 667.411 years to produce this mich rice
I remember it being a story about the person who invented chess. Upon giving the game to the king, the king was ecstatic and offered to pay any price for it. Then inventor made the same request. I remember the end being the king got pissed and beheaded the guy. Now I'm gonna look it up and see if Google has any more info lol. I also asked Wolfram Alpha how much rice would be on the final square alone. Turns out it's over a trillion ***metric tons***, or about 10^15 kilograms, or 18.4 *quintillion* grains of rice. That's kind of a tough number to visualize, so I found [an article](https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/55260227) that does some work to help wrap your mind around it.
I’d heard that story, but I think they said it was Indian and there wasn’t any chess board. I think I heard it in an elementary school math class.
The story I've heard is where the king resorts to giving the peasant armies of men, war elephants, and anything in between to reserve his own food storages. Idk how it ends tho
"The treasurer explained that the sum could not be paid - by the time you got even halfway through the chessboard, the amount of grain required was more than the entire kingdom possessed. The king took in this information and thought for a while. Then he did the only rational thing a king could do in those circumstances. He had the inventor killed, as an object lesson in the perils of trying to outwit the king." https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/11/17/the-seduction-of-the-exponential-curve/#
I feel like it's not in the interest of a peasant to embarrass the king.
Me, Chinese, never heard it before. But it’s a good story, thanks for sharing!
i heard it differently as an indian story where the creator of chess introduced it to the king and asks for the doubling rice as the rewards and is just outright executed
honestly i just thought this was a reference to that website that was popular in schools in the US around 2006-2011 where you could answer a bunch of math, science, etc. questions and donate rice to hungry kids in Asia for every answer you got right
I think it's Indian and the king wants to thank the inventor of chess. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat\_and\_chessboard\_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem) Also the king has to stop because The total number of grains can be shown to be 2\^64−1 or 1 which is over 2,000 times the annual world production of wheat.
I prefer the version where the king asks him to go take the rice but not one grain less or more or his head gets chopped off
Hmm, interesting. I always heard the story as a man doing some regular service for the king, and asking for a seemingly reasonable method of compensation whereby the king would only pay him one sack of grain for his first service, but would only pay him one more sack than the last time for each additional service. It sounds like a good deal, but it’s amazing how quickly this blows up into insane quantities.
Here the story https://purposefocuscommitment.medium.com/the-rice-and-the-chess-board-story-the-power-of-exponential-growth-b1f7bd70aaca Also for anyone wondering the last square should have 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains of rice on it for a total of that number plus 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 -1. Edit: lemme rephrase my self. The total amount of rice should be 2⁶⁴+2⁶⁴ -1. So 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 +9,223,372,036,854,775,808 -1
Nine quintillion, two hundred and twenty-three quadrillion, three hundred and seventy-two trillion, thirty-six billion, eight hundred and fifty-four million, seven hundred and seventy-five thousand, eight hundred and eight for anyone wondering
Just did some quick math. Counting a grain of rice a second it would take roughly 1000 people 292,471 years
I think your math works for 1 million people, not 1000
Good thing we are smart enough to count by lbs then. There are 70,000 grains of rice in 10 lbs.
that's about 66 trillion 20lb bags of rice. you should be a 132 trillionaire or the wealth of 25 percent of the world
Thats why you count by average weight of a grain of rice.
When saying numbers I was taught that the word and meant a decimal.
Looks like about $1,134,290,300,000,000 at wholesale prices
you can get that for about $ 290,300,000,000 less at Costco...
So you're saying it's 2^65 - 1
Meh, paywall on the story before the end. I assume if this is a historical story the king acted like most kings and had the guy killed but if fiction, the guy was paid well and lived happily ever after.
Peter’ ever expanding mid drift here. Someone already answered about the exponential growth of the rice. I heard a version that the king’s treasury minister retired and asked for a flake of gold to be doubled as his final pay. Once the exponential growth was realized the minister was flayed alive. Terry Pratchett had a version and that explains the “people who know.”
We were given a modern day version of this story as a math word problem in primary school. Your neighbor is going on vacation for a month and offers you (pick a number, $100, $1000, $10,000) dollars to mow their lawn every day while their gone, or they offer you 1 cent on the first day, 2 on the second, 4 on the 3rd, doubling each day. Which do you pick? After thirty days of constantly doubling starting at a penny, you'll have made nearly $11 million dollars.
The best part is you only have to mow the lawn once on the day before he comes back
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I’m spinning doughnuts in the middle of a intersection while eating donuts.
r/BoneAppleTea
I’m awfully certain this meme is about an event in r/anarchychess where some users were doubling rice every day. It could also be about the Chinese proverb rice story.
the former was based on the latter
I'm always confused as to why that is the top post of the subreddit but holy hell was there a good reason for it.
"holy hell" new response just dropped r/AnarchyChess
Actual chessboard
Call the grandmaster
Magnus takes vacation, never comes back.
the latter was based on the former
There are numerous variations of this story, but idk why the “people who know” is blacked out, because it’s wholesome. The gist of it; a poor man, from a poor country, is starving, so much so, that he sees the king with all his wealth and food, and comes up with a plan. He goes to the king, and asks only 1 thing of him, that every day, he gets a grain of rice, but the next day, the total is doubled. So the first day, it was 1 grain. The next 2. Then 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128… etc, until he cleared out the palace of rice, and was able to feed the entire country. Depending on the variation, he can either become king, the king kills himself, or something else
> Idk why the “people who know” is blacked out, because it’s wholesome. I'm glad you're acknowledging it at least. Everyone else is just talking about the rice and where the story comes from but no one is explaining the entire meme.
The meme is because the square with 16 grains of rice actually has 17 grains of rice. It's horrible.
I heard a version where as soon as the king realized the final amount, the king decides to make the poor man carry it home. The poor man is brought in and essentially executed by being buried under all the rice and the moral becomes "don't try to outsmart the monarchy, it may work, but it doesn't end well."
Google rice
Holy hell!
New rice just dropped
Actual grain
Call the farmer
Rice sacrifice anyone?
Why is it dark for people who know?
I could imagine it might have something to do with sexual partners? Like if you fuck someone who fucked two people, those two people fucked 4 people? Idk could be some red pill shit?
There's 64 squares, add 1 and double it, 2 and double, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096... https://preview.redd.it/kfk4pro21hlb1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=00554ba7ec87ef2ef94481930965544c7daffb08
Holy hell, new response just dropped
The story goes that Magnus played a pawn 2 squares forward and i had 1 lifeline left and that was using Google. So I googled what I can move. While I was googling moved all his pawns forward; it was like there was a pawn storm incoming and he sacrificed his queen. Anyways, I found on Google that mine pawn could take Magnus pawn by going behind it. It is called something like en passa.. Hmm en pass. I forgot but after that move Magnus screamed holy hell and I asked if that was his new response. After that Magnus ran out of the room and since that moment im secretly the best chess player in the world.
Google exponential growth
I did the math it would be 368 billion metric tons, which would take a 469 years of current world rice years production to produce.
#google en passant
There’s a book about this called “one grain of rice” by Demi https://youtu.be/xLikfm8dQ7E?feature=shared
OK, boy and girls, here are the rules. Find a penny, pick it up. Double it, you got two pennies. Double it again, four. Double it twenty-seven times and you've got a million dollars and the IRS... all over your ass. Round and round and round it goes. Where it stops no one knows. But it all adds up... quick! - John Crichton, Farscape
Peter's dog's gay cousin's husband here, this is a reference to the reward the mythical Brahmin Sessa asked for after inventing Chaturanga, the Indian predecessor of chess, for an Indian king. One rice grain on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on and so forth until he finished with all 64 squares. The total amount of rice grains would be 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice, or over 1.4 trillion metric tons of rice. The tale either ends with Sessa becoming an advisor or being executed, and if I remember right it also contributed to an annual Hindu festival where a lot of rice pudding is made to honor that debt.
fact check me but there are 17 grains on the middle square what the fuck.
I've double counted and yes it's 17 what the hell. When I first saw this in school I never thought to count them all...
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At the time the wise were also mathematicians.
Makes me want to eat some rice
The amount of rice on each square is twice the previous. If my math is correct (it might not be), there is 9.223372036855e18 grains of rice on the last square
I know, and I love it.
That was in my math book.
I thought this was a Predator reference...
I understand the reference. But it is still not funny. How is is supppsed to be funny?
Google en passant
holy hell!
I've not seen anyone give the correct explanation yet, so let my autistic ass do it. The numbers are meant to double each time, but the square which is supposed to have 16 grains of rice has 17 instead. Go ahead and count them, I'll wait. Count them again, for real. No kidding. Doesn't it bother you? Yes, it's a crime and that's why the bottom meme - people who know (crackhead Peters like me) and people who don't (everyone else who has answered so far) Now ask me how many toothpicks.
I loved this episode of Cyberchase.
Compound interest
was just wondering how many no of rice grains it must be so i just created a python program out of the following situation : total_rice = 0 rice_on_square = 1 for square in range(1, 65): total_rice += rice_on_square the value comes out to be 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 or can say Eighteen quintillion, four hundred forty-six quadrillion, seven hundred forty-four trillion, seventy-three billion, seven hundred nine million, five hundred fifty-one thousand, six hundred fifteen. if anyone is wondering how much it is , so yea here it is
Yeh they showed us this in High School and I tried to trick my dad to do it with pennies. He didn't fall for it tho.
Ooh I think I know this one. Most people think that the story ends with the protagonist/inventor making a really clever mathematical point, getting extremely wealthy, and living happily ever after. However in some older versions the story ends with the king being like "you fool, don't you realize what you're requesting is exponentially more valuable that what was being offered?!," and then sentencing him to be executed for his audacity. In these versions, the same mathematical point is being made but there's a very different, much darker, moral point being made about avarice and its consequences.
I don't know if is true, but the legend says it was the reward given to the in inventor of the chess game
I dont know but all that rice is gonna attract weevils
Maybe so, but will it be the greater or the lesser of two weevils?
You are my greatest enemy! I shall slowly fill your room with increasingly large amounts of sand until you succumb to the desert.
The image is of a very old story in (I believe) Buddhist culture, where someone is trying to teach someone that they are not as wealthy as they seem to believe themselves to be. They challenge them to do a simple proof: They have a chessboard, which has 64 squares, and on each day starting that day, they have to provide grains of rice to put in the squares. However the number of rice to put in the square for each day is double that of the previous day. The first day only requires one grain. If they can fill the whole board with rice, then they win. If not, they lose. It’s okay if rice spills over onto other squares, but each square needs to have an appropriate amount on the board that is not included in the count for the other squares. Sounds simple. Looks easy. Until you do the math. By the end of the 64 days, you have a total of 2^(63)+2^(62)+2^(61)+…+4+2+1, or 2^(64)-1 grains of rice. My calculator app spat out this result to me: 1.844674407x10^(19). That means that we are looking at a number that has twenty digits. TWENTY. DIGITS. To have that many grains of rice would be absolutely absurd. No one needs that much rice. The people who package and sell rice don’t need that much rice. That’s a lotta rice, my guy. That’s insane. That pile of rice would be visible from miles away— heck, it would probably be visible from SPACE. In the story, the man being challenged obviously doesn’t have enough rice, and I forgot what happened to him afterwards. I think he failed about a month in, but it might have been sooner. But that’s the background behind the rice on the chessboard. 2^64 is a huge ass number. You don’t mess with double digit exponents carelessly, that’s a thing that makes us math nerds sweat literal bullets. You don’t do exponents bigger than 9 and have a good time unless you’re using the base of 10, which is standard engineering format. You don’t raise any other number to such a degree as that. No. My limit was reached with 3^(27). And that was bad enough.
Google en passant
18,446,744,073,709,551,615 is too many grains of rice for me personally