Exponential Growth

Day 309 / 365

In an earlier blog post, I talked about how Compound Interest can grow surprisingly quickly. It is counter-intuitive, sure, but it is nowhere close to how crazy exponential growth is. Let me explain with a short story.

A king was once happy with one of his disciples and told him to ask for anything he wanted. He said a very simple request. He gave the king a chessboard, and asked him to put one grain of wheat on the first square. Then the next day, put 2 grains in the next square, and 4 in the next square the day after. The idea was to double the number of grains on each day. The king laughed at how foolish the guy was, he could have asked for anything but he would just get a few grains of wheat.

Now think about that for a moment. A chessboard has 64 squares. How much wheat do you think would be needed to fulfill his request? just a handful? a kilo maybe?

How that story ended was that the king was not able to fulfill the request. He didn’t even come close, and he had used up all the wheat produced in his kingdom!

Don’t believe me? you can try it yourself. Or you could go to this Wikipedia page and see the calculations yourself — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem

In fact, to fill the entire chessboard this way will take 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of wheat, which is 1.2 trillion tonnes. This is about 1600 times the amount of wheat produced in the world in a year! So even if the King had access to all the wheat in the world, he could not have fulfilled the request.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — Mind the gap