There’s going to be a lot of force on that loop. I wonder if we have materials strong enough.
Dr. Strangelove’s suggestion of making it out of scrith is obviously silly, but maybe you could make it out of General Products hull material.
The standard counter strategy is to place one grain of WHEAT on your first square, 2 on the next, 4 on the next, etc. Since the world produces more wheat than rice, your opponent will run out of moves before you do.
The world produces more wheat by weight, but a grain of wheat is larger than a grain of rice, which means that there are more individual grains of rice than individual grains of wheat - so rice wins.
A kernel of corn is even larger, so wheat beats corn, but corn is fed to more livestock than rice, so corn beats rice.
It all depends on your opening move.
Global corn production is around 1.15 billion tons per year, while rice production is around 775 million tons. However, a kernel of corn weighs about 10 times as much as a grain of rice, so in terms of raw grain numbers, rice wins easily.
I was hoping to go for a bad rock/paper/scissors allegory.
If any grain falls outside its square, it’s an illegal move and forfeits the game.
Wait, when did this become a contest between two people adding grain to the board?
When adding grains to the board was established to be a legal move.
I’m adding chickens to the board each time it’s my turn. Check mate, fools!
Why-a-chicken? Why-a not-a duck?
I place a single plutonium atom in the corner square.
Semi-serious question: When is it game over?
A quick Googling shows that the critical mass of plutonium is about 11 kg. Somebody better at math than me would have to tell you where that is on our chessboard.
If you’re starting with a single plutonium atom, then I think you fall several squares short. You’ll end with 2^64 atoms on the final square, and 2^65 overall. 2^60 is (2^10)^6, and 2^10 = 10^3, so that’s 32*10^18, or 1/20000 of a mole. A mole of plutonium atoms is 200-something grams, so your chessboard will end up with a hundredth of a gram of plutonium. That’s about six orders of magnitude short of a critical mass; you’d need about 20 more squares on the chessboard.
I’d say when you make an illegal move by putting grains of rice in the wrong square. Depending on the size of the board and your stacking abilities, probably near the end of the first row or early in the second row.
2, 5, and 18 are the first three prime numbers?
I frequently don’t get XKCD, and that’s fine when it’s clearly about something I have no knowledge of.
But I feel like I should get this one, and I don’t.