[Diogenesian]

Hmm, fair enough - I checked Wikipedia. My mind completely erased the "sophon" bit or whatever it was called, it just got erased again. Not a fan of that particular fairy dust.

I thought they were referring to the inability of the aliens to make an accurate calendar.

[pavel_lishin]

No, I was referring to the human scientists' reaction to the sophons' interference.

But I thought that the Trisolarians' inability to predict their planets' path also seemed weird. Yes, the three-body problem isn't analytically solvable, but you can brute force it, and I would imagine that a species that is capable of creating sophons and starships with hulls made out of the Strong-force could calculate their planet's trajectory for the next thousand years without too many problems. (It would be academic, anyway - if you can build that kind of technology, why do you even need planets?)

And I also hated the sophons.

[d0mine]

The error grows exponentially. For example, for equal-mass triple with Earth sized orbit initially, the prediction limit is just a few hundreds years even if you know initial conditions up to the plank length (LLM estimate of ~135 Lyapunov times).

[rbanffy]

The uncertainty increases and predictions are reliable only up to a couple hundred years but those hundred years are good enough at any point in time, because you redo your predictions all the time.

This kind of iterative process might yield some insights on how uncertainty creeps into the system.

[physicalecon]

I believe at some point they disclose the Trisolaians aren’t actually interested in “solving” the problem. They do have analytical methods, but the problem isn’t prediction but rather the fact that everything they have will routinely burn to the ground and they’ll need to restart from 0. Also they will at some point get flung into a sun.

The “we need to solve this problem!” thread was a ploy to get earthly scientists invested in their plight such that they could convince them to support their cause from the inside.

[worldthruword]

Trisolarans had advanced technology which means they knew about probability. Probability immediately implies Lying and the two types of scientific error we have. ie false positives and false negatives

[rbanffy]

All we needed to do would be to introduce game theory to them. It doesn’t matter what we say. We deal with zero trust all the time.

[glenstein]

That's actually a great example for what it is. If I were a scientist I probably wouldn't be reacting with "yay science" to every next failure that destroys civilization, even if notionally those are building up the body of data that could eventually lead to success.