The Three-Body Problem

A red EXIT sign showed up above the Great Hall’s cavelike entrance. Players in the Great Hall streamed toward it, and Wang followed the crowd. Through the long tunnel, they finally emerged outside the pyramid. Heavy snow falling through the night air greeted them. The bone-chilling cold caused Wang to shiver, and a display in a corner of the sky indicated that game time had sped up again.

The snow continued without pause for ten days. By now the snowflakes were large and heavy, like pieces of solidified darkness. Someone whispered next to Wang, “The snow is now composed of frozen carbon dioxide, dry ice.” Wang turned around and saw that the speaker was Follower.

After another ten days, the snowflakes turned thin and translucent. By the weak light from a few torches within the entrance to the long tunnel, the snowflakes gave off a faint blue glow, like pieces of dancing mica.

“Those snowflakes are now composed of solidified oxygen and nitrogen. The atmosphere is disappearing through deposition, which means it’s near absolute zero above.”

Snow gradually buried the pyramid. The lowest layers were composed of water snow, then dry ice, and finally, on top, snow made of oxygen and nitrogen. The night sky became especially clear, and the stars glowed like a field of silver bonfires. A line of text appeared against the starry background:

The long night lasted forty-eight years. Civilization Number 137 was destroyed by the extreme cold. This civilization had advanced to the Warring States Period before succumbing.

The seed of civilization remains. It will germinate and again progress through the unpredictable world of Three Body. We invite you to log on in the future.

Before exiting the game, Wang noticed the three flying stars in the sky. Revolving closely around each other, they seemed to perform a strange dance against the abyss of space.

8

Ye Wenjie

Wang took off the V-suit and panoramic viewing helmet. His shirt was soaked with sweat, as if he had just awoken from a nightmare. He left the Research Center, got into his car, and drove to the address given to him by Ding Yi: the house of Yang Dong’s mother.

Chaotic Era, Chaotic Era, Chaotic Era …

The thought turned and turned in Wang’s head. Why would the path of the sun through the world of Three Body be devoid of regularity and pattern? Whether a planet’s orbit is more circular or more elliptical, its motion around its sun must be periodic. Total irregularity in planetary motion is impossible.…

Wang grew angry with himself. He shook his head, trying to chase away these thoughts. It’s only a game!

But I lost.

Chaotic Era, Chaotic Era, Chaotic Era …

Damn it! Stop! Why am I thinking about this? Why?

Soon, Wang found the answer. He had not played any computer games for years, and the hardware for gaming had clearly advanced greatly in the interim. The virtual reality and multisensory feedback were all effects he had not experienced as a young student. But Wang also knew that the sense of realism in Three Body wasn’t due to the interface technology.

He remembered taking a class in information theory as a third-year student in college. The professor had put up two pictures: One was the famous Song Dynasty painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival, full of fine, rich details; the other was a photograph of the sky on a sunny day, the deep blue expanse broken only by a wisp of cloud that one couldn’t even be sure was there. The professor asked the class which picture contained more information. The answer was that the photograph’s information content—its entropy—exceeded the painting’s by one or two orders of magnitude.

Three Body was the same. Its enormous information content was hidden deep. Wang could feel it, but he could not articulate it. He suddenly understood that the makers of Three Body took the exact opposite of the approach taken by designers of other games. Normally, game designers tried to display as much information as possible to increase the sense of realism. But Three Body’s designers worked to compress the information content to disguise a more complex reality, just like that seemingly empty photograph of the sky.

Wang let his mind wander back to the world of Three Body.

Flying stars! The key must be in the flying stars. One flying star, two flying stars, three flying stars … what did they mean?

As he had that thought, he found himself at his destination.