05 May Power of Doubling
As the old Indian story goes, when the new chess game was presented to a great king, the king offered the inventor any reward that he wanted. The inventor asked that a single grain of wheat be placed on the first square of the chessboard. Then two grains on the second square, four grains on the third, and so on. Doubling each time. The ruler laughed it off as a meager prize for a brilliant invention, only to have court treasurers report that the unexpectedly huge number of wheat grains would outstrip the ruler’s entire resources.
There are 8 x 8 = 64 squares on a chessboard, so doubling grains for 64 days. The subject receives 2^64 – 1 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of wheat.
Applying this to Knowing Another Initiative: if the number people making name tags doubled daily, which is possible, by day 34 there would be 8.5 Billion people with names! –More than the 6 Billion people in the world! So pass on the website and make and gift tags!