"But the brain can turn to mush when faced with more complicated problems, if it hasn't been taught how to think them through.
A famous example is the rice and chessboard problem.
If someone gave you a chessboard (which has 64 squares on it) and asked you to put one grain of rice on the first square, two grains of rice on the second square, four grains of rice on the third, eight grains on the fourth, and so on, how many grains of rice would end up on the 64th square?
It sounds like an easy question — it's simply asking you to double the number of rice grains from one square to the next, from 1 grain to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 to 32 to 64, and so on, until the 64th square.
Dow/Tao 42 - Sometimes Gain Comes From Losing?
A famous example is the rice and chessboard problem.
If someone gave you a chessboard (which has 64 squares on it) and asked you to put one grain of rice on the first square, two grains of rice on the second square, four grains of rice on the third, eight grains on the fourth, and so on, how many grains of rice would end up on the 64th square?
It sounds like an easy question — it's simply asking you to double the number of rice grains from one square to the next, from 1 grain to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 to 32 to 64, and so on, until the 64th square.
What's the answer? You'd need 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains of rice for the 64th square."
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| From Jake Kotze's Instagram feed |
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| 64 squares? |
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| 2020: Year of the Rat? |
I might have to read a couple of books and watch a few movies in my [lock]downtime.
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