Chess Legend

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Umang Vidyarthi

Friends,

Welcome to the new forum. :bigwave:

Before the legend, a simple question: How many squares are on the Chess board?

Chess is one of the oldest game in the word, played on a board having 64 squares. Chess, legend has it, comes from India. The then king Sriram was thrilled to see the huge number of possible moves,and decided to reward the inventor, a teacher named Sessa.

The king summoned Sessa and said "I wish to reward thee for thy wonderful invention, so name what thou wouldst have and thou shall have it."

Sessa replied "Thy kindness knows no bounds O'Lord, but I need time to consider my reply."

Next day, Sessa surprised the king by his extremely modest request. He said "My Lord, I would like to have one grain of wheat for the 1st square of the chess board.."

"A grain of ordinary wheat!?!" King could hardly believe his ears.

"..Yess sir. two for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth...."

"Enough", roared the king. "Thou shalt get thy grains for all the 64 squares as thou wishest: for every square double the amount of preceding square. But know thou that thy request is not worthy of my generosity. By asking for such a trite reward, thou hast shown disrespect to me. Go away! my servants will bring thee thy sack of grains."

I am taking a break here to give a poser: Can you estimate the quantity of wheat given to Sessa?

Umang :D
 
D

D.Scott

He would end up with 18,446,744,073,709,600,000 grains of wheat.

Good luck with the forum :agree1:

Dave
 
Tim Folkerts

Tim Folkerts

Trusted Information Resource
I think you are off by one, Dave ... 18,446,744,073,709,599,999. :rolleyes:

But 1/18,446,744,073,709,599,999 would be a 10.6 sigma quality level, which I suppose is good enough for a coffee break forum! :biglaugh:


As for volume ... we could estimate the size of one grain as perhaps 1mm x 1 mm x 5 mm, which gives 10^11 = 100 billion m^3

A super-tanker is perhaps 300m long x 20 m tall x 40 m wide. The grain would fill in the vicinity of half a million supertankers.


Tim
 
W

wmarhel

Tim Folkerts said:
I think you are off by one, Dave ... 18,446,744,073,709,599,999. :rolleyes:

But 1/18,446,744,073,709,599,999 would be a 10.6 sigma quality level, which I suppose is good enough for a coffee break forum! :biglaugh:


As for volume ... we could estimate the size of one grain as perhaps 1mm x 1 mm x 5 mm, which gives 10^11 = 100 billion m^3

A super-tanker is perhaps 300m long x 20 m tall x 40 m wide. The grain would fill in the vicinity of half a million supertankers.


Tim
Click to expand...

That's alot of fiber......I'd of asked for a roll or two of toilet paper to go along with the wheat. :rolleyes:

Wayne
 
U

Umang Vidyarthi

Umang Vidyarthi said:
Friends,

Welcome to the new forum. :bigwave:

Before the legend, a simple question: How many squares are on the Chess board?
Chess is one of the oldest game in the word, played on a board having 64 squares. Chess, legend has it, comes from India. The then king Sriram was thrilled to see the huge number of possible moves,and decided to reward the inventor, a teacher named Sessa.
Click to expand...

I am waiting for reply of this simple question.

D.Scott said:
He would end up with 18,446,744,073,709,600,000 grains of wheat.

Good luck with the forum :agree1:

Dave
Click to expand...

Dave, your answer is close. The correct answer is "18,446,744,073,709,551,615"

Tim Folkerts said:
I think you are off by one, Dave ... 18,446,744,073,709,599,999. :rolleyes:

But 1/18,446,744,073,709,599,999 would be a 10.6 sigma quality level, which I suppose is good enough for a coffee break forum! :biglaugh:


As for volume ... we could estimate the size of one grain as perhaps 1mm x 1 mm x 5 mm, which gives 10^11 = 100 billion m^3

A super-tanker is perhaps 300m long x 20 m tall x 40 m wide. The grain would fill in the vicinity of half a million supertankers.


Tim
Click to expand...

You are an smart alec Tim, knowing fulwell that the answer had to be an odd number (the first square has one grain only), you simply negated 1 from Dave's answer and landed on a wrong figure. Yet your analogy for calculation of volume is commendable. :applause:

The calculation is simple: (2^64)-1. To facilitate easy calculation let us break it into six groups of 2^10 and seventh 2^4. So we have:

1024 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 x 16.

= 1048576 x 1048576 x 1048576 x 16. multiplying and substracting 1 we get:"18,446,744,073,709,551,615"

In order to comprehend this gigantic number, let's calculate size of granary required to store all this wheat grain. A cubic metre of wheat contains approx. 15,000,000 normal size grains, hence the required granary size would be approx. 12,000,000,000,000 cubic meters or 12000 cubic kilometres. If we take a granary of 10 M length and 4 M width, then its height will be 300,000,000 kilometres that is nearly twice the distance between Earth and Sun!!

Umang :D
 
U

Umang Vidyarthi

Demetrio said:
85?
I am sorry, I am not good in English :(
Click to expand...

Sorry, wrong answer.

Yarik said:
Didn't see any replies...

204 ?
Click to expand...

Absolutely right! Majority answers 64 (8X8) which is incorrect. In all there are:

1. One unit sq.....8X8 = 64
2. Two unit sq.....7X7 = 49
3. Three unit sq...6X6 = 36
4. Four unit sq.....5X5 = 25
5. Five unit sq.....4X4 = 16
6. Six unit sq.......3X3 = 09
7. Seven unit sq..2X2 = 04
8. Eight unit sq....1X1 = 01
.........TOTAL..............204

Umang :D
 
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