#2936: Exponential Growth
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[Black Hat is talking to Cueball standing next to him, arm raised.]
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 two additional bags next to him, each labeled "Rice", and a pile of rice already on the table. Some rice has spilled off, and a small pile of rice is growing at Black Hat's feet. A frustrated Hairy is walking away, fists clenched. On Hairy's side of the chessboard there is a white king and pawn.]
[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.
(Sourced from explainxkcd.com)
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.