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Revision as of 01:23, 30 June 2014
Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki!
We have an explanation for all 2 xkcd comics,
and only 7
(0%) are incomplete. Help us finish them!
Latest comic
| Exponential Growth |
 Title text: Karpov's construction of a series of increasingly large rice cookers led to a protracted deadlock, but exponential growth won in the end. |
Explanation
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This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a 2^64TH ITERATION OF A BOT - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. |
Exponential growth is the principle that if you keep multiplying a number by a value larger than 1, you will pretty quickly get very large numbers. Even if you start with 1 and simply double it each time, you'll have a 10-digit number after about 30 iterations.
This principle is often illustrated using the story "Game of Rice". A king of India wished to reward a man for creating a new game of Chess, and told him that he'd grant any wish. The man simply asked for a grain of wheat to be placed on a chess board and for it to double with each square on the board each day. The king granted his strange request and ordered one wheat grain to be placed on the board. The second day two more pieces were placed on the square next to that and the day after four pieces on the next. However, by day 20 there was over 500,000 grains on the board. The king had to dig into his own stock pile to pay his dues. On day 24 the king owed 8 million grains. By day 32 the king owed over 2 billion pieces of grain, at this point he had to give up and offered the man another prize.
Black Hat begins describing the metaphor, only to reveal it wasn't a metaphor at all. Black Hat had been playing actual Chess games, and tried to force his opponent to resign by burying the chess pieces in rice.
Garry Kasparov is a world renowned Russian chess master. He had the highest FIDE chess rating in the world-one of 2851 points-until Magnus Carlsen surpassed that in 2013 by 31 points. The Kasparov gambit is an opening move in chess.
In 1984-85 Garry Kasparov played Anatoly Karpov in a 5-month-long 48-game championship tournament which was abandoned. In the 1986 rematch Garry Kasparov retained his world championship title.
In the 1984-85 match Kasparov was losing 4-0 with 6 points being required to win. Kasparov proceeded to draw 35 times before the match was abandoned.
Instead of this being a (possibly apocryphal) story, Black Hat used it literally during a game of chess to annoy his opponent into quitting.
- First row:
- a1: 1
- a2: 2
- a3: 4
- a4: 8
- a5: 16
- a6: 32
- a7: 64
- a8: 128
- Second row
- b1: 256
- b2: 512
- b3: 1,024
- b4: 2,048
- b5: 4,096
- b6: 8,192
- b7: 16,384
- b8: 32,768
- First of each row
- c1: 65,536
- d1: 16,777,216
- e1: 4,294,967,300
- f1: 1,099,511,630,000
- g1: 281,474,977,000,000
- ...
- Eighth row
- h1: 72,057,594,040,000,000
- h2: 144,115,188,100,000,000
- h3: 288,230,376,200,000,000
- h4: 576,460,752,300,000,000
- h5: 1,152,921,505,000,000,000
- h6: 2,305,843,009,000,000,000
- h7: 4,611,686,018,000,000,000
- h8: 9,223,372,037,000,000,000
Transcript
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This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks. |
- [Black Hat is talking to Cueball standing next to him.]
- Black Hat: Exponential growth is very powerful.
- [Closeup on Black Hat. Next to him is an image of the lower left part of a chessboard. The four leftmost squares in the bottom row have grains of rice on them -- one, two, four, and eight grains respectively.]
- Black Hat: A chessboard has 64 squares.
- Black Hat: Say you put one grain of rice on the first square, then two grains on the second, then four, then eight, doubling each time.
- [Black Hat has emptied a bag of rice on a chessboard. There are several bags next to him and a pile of rice already on the table. A frustrated Hairy is walking away, fists clenched.]
- [Caption above panel, representing Black Hat continuing to speak:]
- If you keep this up, your opponent will resign in frustration.
- It's called Kasparov's Grain Gambit. Nearly impossible to counter.
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