What the hell is this?

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There's a story about the invention of the chessboard that's probably not true since it's a math parable and the chessboard was invented a really, really long time ago. According to the story, the man who invented chess brought the board to the king, and the king was so taken with it he offered the man whatever he wanted. The man supposedly said, "Well, I'd like one grain of rice on the first square of the board, two on the second, four on the third, and so on, each having twice as much as the last square until all the squares are covered."

"That seems reasonable," said the king, not being a mathematician. The king quickly discovers that in order to complete the request, he would need more grain than has ever grown or will ever grow in all the world. Upon discovering this, he beheads the man, the stupidest part of this story being it having a character smart enough to make a balanced strategy game yet too dumb not to try to con ax-happy kings.

But there's another problem with the story. People always toss around huge numbers of things to describe exponential growth, and "all the grain, ever" is just as meaningless as a billion light years. There's just no way to really fit it in your mind, and seeing 1 go to 100,000,000,000,000 doesn't have the umph it should.

All this came to mind while I was idly programming something to create every possible 8x8 pixel black and white image, and I suddenly realized that it was going to take a very, very long time.

The Chess Board Clock is an attempt to get closer to comprehending how quickly the tiny goes to the enormous in exponential growth. It's basically a binary clock counting down 2 to the 63rd power in hundredths of a second. (Another way to put it, since my non-mathy friends pointed out that this is gibberish to them: the first square changes every 1/100th of a second, the second square changes every 2/100ths of a second, the third every 4/100ths of a second, the fourth every 8/100ths of a second, etc.) The invisibly rapid motion of cycling through little numbers in the upper left gives way to an agonizingly slow progression of the bottom-right-most black square, which represents the highest order of binary magnitude the clock has reached. I hope it becomes viscerally clear why it's going to take so long to get to that last square, just a few inches away.

I've included some notes about the squares you probably won't be alive to see.

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