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fragallrocks
18th April 2002, 11:44 AM
I have been shown some pretty strange things as demonstrations, but this fact came out when we were having a discussion about weeds.

If you placed one penny on the first square of a chess board, two one the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth and keep doubling the number for each square, if you piled the pennies from the last square on top of each other it would strech TEN times the distance from the earth to the sun. Therefore it would take a beam of light 80 minutes to travel from the top of the stack to the bottom.

Of course that was the only semi-intersting thing in that lecture, it was also so very warm and I missed the rest as I quietly fell asleep.
But hey everyone needs a rest now and then.

jema
18th April 2002, 11:50 AM
and if each penny was a byte of memory, you still wouldn't have enough to stop windows crashing :D

jema

GITster
18th April 2002, 01:18 PM
2^63 = 9223372036854775808 :)

RaNGeR.GaV
18th April 2002, 11:03 PM
lol jema! :D
Crackin me up :)

mackerel
19th April 2002, 12:15 AM
Originally posted by GITster
2^63 = 9223372036854775808 :)

Shouldn't it be (2^64)-1 ?

Working with low numbers to keep the maths easy...
If there are...
2 squares, you'll have 1+2 = 3 = (2^2)-1
3 squares, you'll have 1+2+4 = 7 = (2^3)-1
4 squares, you'll have 1+2+4+8 = 15 = (2^4)-1

Chess board has 64 squares.