I
was alone in the library playing chess when Papa came in with Monsieur de Maillard. He startled, moving a piece on the board
and smiling he commented on my strategy. As he settled in an armchair to drink coffee, M. de Maillard told
me an extraordinary story about how the game originated. He said that chess is related to mathematics. I recount what
he told me:
Many centuries ago there was a king who wanted a unique game
that no one else had, a game that was so original that it could be played over and over in endless combinations, a game that
would teach the children of the royal family to become better thinkers and better leaders on the battlefield. With this in
mind, a wise man invented the game that we now call chess. The king was very pleased, and he offered as a payment anything
the man would want, gold, jewels, anything. The wise man asked to be paid with wheat grain. When asked how much, the man replied
that he wanted the amount based on the number of squares on the game board.
His formula was simple; for square one, he wanted one grain. For square two, it would be doubled to 2 pieces, for square three,
it would be 4 pieces, for square four it would be 8 pieces, and so forth until all sixty four squares were filled in this
proportion. The king was surprised by the seemingly modesty of this request, and he ordered a sack of wheat grain. The king’s
servants patiently began to place the grain on each square on the board as requested by the wise man. Soon, they discovered
that not even all the grain in the kingdom would be sufficient to cover half of the squares on the chessboard.
M. de Maillard asked me if I could figure this out by myself.
Hence, I will start by illustrating the distribution of wheat grain on the chessboard using numbers. Since there are 8 squares
on the first row, I write:
1 2
4 8 16
32 64
128
in the second
row:
256 512
1,024 2,048 4,096 8,192 16,384 32,768
in the third
row:
65,536 131,072
262,144 524,288 1,048,576 2,097,152 4,194,304 8,388,608
