[kstrauser]

spoiler

Also, "The Dark Forest" could've been shortened to a chapter if Ye Wenjie could have been bothered to just tell Luo Ji what she meant, saving a couple hundred years, hundreds of trillions of dollars, and untold human suffering in wasted efforts.

[snapcaster]

I wonder if she understood the solution though? Understanding the principles she explained and being able to leverage them in a meaningful way to solve the present problem are two different things. It felt to me like she just framed the problem and Luo Ji solved it but I guess we'll never know how much she didn't say

[kstrauser]

I inferred that she understood the conclusion of the axioms she handed down. Once Luo came to the same conclusion, he came up with a solution relatively quickly, and I’m not sure that the years he spent pondering the problem helped with that.

By analogy, it seemed as though Einstein came up with the general theory of relativity, and instead of publishing it, just gave his colleagues strong hints about which direction to look in. Thanks, I guess, but it would’ve been nice if you’d passed along “E=mc**2” so we could’ve started applying it in the mean time.