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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum
GLD 386.44-0.2%Dec 5 4:00 PM EST
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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (140939)4/24/2018 6:03:38 AM
From: Joseph Silent1 Recommendation

Recommended By
bull_dozer

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Since you decided to go all numerate on me I'll humor you.

The answer for the last square is 2^63 for a standard chessboard. This is also related to the number of time units it would take to move the three discs from the first pillar to the third pillar in the "Towers of Hanoi" problem.

Let's do the whole chessboard instead of just the 64th square.

The total number of grains of rice (theoretically) on the entire board would be the 64th Mersenne prime 2^64 - 1. One pound of rice is roughly 30,000 grains (likely an upper bound for a heavier variety).

Let N = 614891469124. Then N containers, each containing 30 million pounds of rice will satisfy your entire chessboard. You can work out how many wheelbarrows you would need from those numbers, depending on the kind of wheelbarrow you use, but it will be a large number. Since 30 million pounds of rice is the same as 13607.78 metric tonnes, you now have less than 13608*N metric tonnes to work with.

China consumed 143000 metric tonnes of rice last year. India is not far behind. As an estimate, both countries (together) consumed 250000 metric tonnes of rice last year. This means it would take both countries 2459565.88*13608 = 33469772447.5 (approx) years to consume all that rice. You could halve the time if all the other countries decided to gorge themselves on rice too.

The problem with exponential growth is that it is theoretical. People were eating rice long before they were "Chinese" or "Indian" or anything else and they will likely continue long after. The theory hits a barrier when it meets the limitations of our reality.

In that large time frame cultures, economies, peoples, civilizations, currencies etc. will come and go just like the blue boy's number of ants in the instruction of the God Indra. When this barrier is hit the system resets in some way and some form of some cycle repeats. It is never the same. It is never different.
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