yeah, from the before time, in the long-ago. in reference to the bible and stuff.

it's still the same culture. they converted to islam but they still were the inventors of chess.

what reminded me of it was the persian mathematician who asked to be paid in rice using a power of two series for the amount.

brave leo:

The story of the rice on the chessboard is often associated with a Persian legend involving a sage or inventor named Sissa or Sissa ben Dahir, who requested a reward of grains of wheat (or rice in some versions) doubling on each square of a chessboard, starting with one grain on the first square.

This tale, which illustrates exponential growth, is documented in the Shahnameh, an epic poem composed by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE.

However, scholarly analysis suggests that while the story is deeply embedded in Persian cultural lore, the earliest verifiable textual attestation of the wheat and chessboard problem appears in 9th-century Arabic writings by Ibn Waḍīḥ yaʿqūb al-Qurashī, who described a similar scenario involving grains doubling on a chessboard as a reward for inventing the game.

The motif likely spread from Islamic scholarship to Persian and later Byzantine traditions through cross-cultural exchange.

haha ok, so it wasn't actually a persian mathematician, but that's the folklore. haha. neat.

When he says 'the west' he means the US of A 🤣