I found an amazing YouTube by Stephen Fry

[Bob the Unbeliever]

I love listening to Stephen Fry's incredible speaking style. This is brilliant, and he covers ancestry and chess. Yes.. the game of chess. Well worth your time, IMO.

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

I'm 10 minutes in, and this is quite good as well--but it's an hour or so long.

 

[Howard Is]

This is brilliant, and he covers ancestry and chess. Yes.. the game of chess.

That reminded me of an old Sufi story which revolves around the chess board.

A man risks his life and saves the Sultan’s daughter from certain death.
The Sultan is so grateful, he tells the man to name his reward...he can have anything in the Sultan’s kingdom.

The man asks him to get a chess board and a bag of rice.

He takes a grain of rice and places it in a corner square of the chessboard. Then he places two grains in the adjacent square, and four in the next. He tells the Sultan that for his reward he would like that process of doubling the number of rice grains completed for all 64 squares.

The Sultan is amazed at his lack of greed.

“Is that all you want ?”

This same story also has a Buddhist version, so it was probably told along the Silk Road.
The ancients knew about exponentiation.
And they had possibly watched the process of population increase leading to K-extinctions, which occur at a specific population density for populations of every species, as explained by Edward O Wilson in ‘Sociobiology : The New Synthesis’

There’s a Day of Judgement coming ! Look out !

 

[SomeRandom]

I love listening to Stephen Fry's incredible speaking style. This is brilliant, and he covers ancestry and chess. Yes.. the game of chess. Well worth your time, IMO.

I love Stephen Fry. I could listen to him for hours.
IIRC my grade 5 class played us the audiobook version of the first Harry Potter book and he was the narrator.