Assume that each grain of wheat weighs 1/7000 pounds. The total world harvest of all grains (what, rice, and corn) in 2010 was about 2.2 billion tons. How does this total compare to the weght of the wheat on the chessboard? (1 ton=2000 pounds)
+37146 From Wikipedia:
The wheat and chessboard problem (sometimes expressed in terms of rice grains) is a mathematical problem expressed in textual form as:
If a chessboard were to have wheat placed upon each square such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on (doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square), how many grains of wheat would be on the chessboard at the finish?
The problem may be solved using simple addition. With 64 squares on a chessboard, if the number of grains doubles on successive squares, then the sum of grains on all 64 squares is: 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + ... and so forth for the 64 squares. The total number of grains equals 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, much higher than what most intuitively expect.
2200000000*2000*7000 = 30800000000000000 grains of wheat produced
3.08 x10^16/2^64 =.001669671 or the chess board has approx 599 times more wheat !
