Write a program that calculates the number of grains of wheat on a chessboard given that the number on each square doubles.

There once was a wise servant who saved the life of a prince. The king promised to pay whatever the servant could dream up. Knowing that the king loved chess, the servant told the king he would like to have grains of wheat. One grain on the first square of a chess board. Two grains on the next. Four on the third, and so on.

There are 64 squares on a chessboard.

Write a program that shows:

• how many grains were on each square, and
• the total number of grains

Did you get the tests passing and the code clean? If you want to, these are some additional things you could try:

• Optimize for speed.
• Optimize for readability.

Then please share your thoughts in a comment on the submission. Did this experiment make the code better? Worse? Did you learn anything from it?

For installation and learning resources, refer to the exercism help page.

For running the tests provided, you will need the Minitest gem. Open a terminal window and run the following command to install minitest:

gem install minitest

If you would like color output, you can require 'minitest/pride' in the test file, or note the alternative instruction, below, for running the test file.

In order to run the test, you can run the test file from the exercise directory. For example, if the test suite is called hello_world_test.rb, you can run the following command:

ruby hello_world_test.rb

To include color from the command line:

ruby -rminitest/pride hello_world_test.rb

The test files may have the execution bit set so you may also be able to run it like this:

./hello_world_test.rb

JavaRanch Cattle Drive, exercise 6 view source