The three-body problem

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.

Translated from Chinese by Ken Liu