chapotraphouse

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Watching 3 body problem and remembering a nitpick I have with it (spoilers for the VR game plot) (hexbear.net)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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So the computer based solution proposed by Newton and Turing is rejected because the system is chaotic, meaning a general solution will always diverge from reality.

What I don't get is: this should still be good enough Run your solution every month or so, with updated measurements, and you'll have an ongoing "forecast" of conditions.

I'm referencing weather because that's we do. A weather forecast is a prediction of a chaotic system, but of one which changes every day or so. Prediction difficulty is dependent on local conditions and weather type, but we can still make predictions.

A gravitational system of 4 mutually interacting bodies is muuuuuch simpler than weather, and could be predicted far enough in advance to let a civilization adapt and persist!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Most of us can survive most of the weather most of the time, for now. Getting slingshotted deep into space or into another celestial body is like a category 999 hurricane; nothing's going to be able to adapt.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Well yeah, I guess I just don't like how it's waved away as useless when there's very real civilizational utility in being able to predict orbits with e.g. 99% accuracy out to like 2 months.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The video game stuff is meant to be an abstraction for a human audience, rather than directly showing what Trisolaris is up to. They're demonstrating that the computer is "useless" in preventing calamity, any other utility is irrelevant so they'd have had no reason to bring it up.