““exponential growth. In ancient China a man came to the emperor and demonstrated to him his invention of the game of chess. The emperor was so impressed by the brilliance of the man’s invention that he told the man to name his reward. The man asked for his reward in an amount of rice — that one grain be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on — doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square. Not being a very good mathematician, the emperor at first thought the reward to be too modest and directed his servants to fulfill the man’s request. By the time the rice grains filled the first half of the chessboard, the man had more than four billion rice grains — or about the harvest of one rice field. At that point the man was rich. By the time the servants got to the sixty-fourth square, the man had more than eighteen quintillion rice grains (18 x 1018), or more than all the wealth in the land. But his wealth and ability to outsmart the emperor came with a price — he ended up being decapitated.””
