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Comment by crimsonalucard | Hacker News Reader

I found the three body problems' representation of a computer with 30 million soldiers really stupid. I didn't read the book because of people raving about how clever that concept of the human computer is.

http://linusrosskamp.com/articles/2017-08/three-body-problem...

Guess what.

You can achieve the same power of computation with 1 person, a pen, a paper and our standard number symbols 0-9.

Do people not realize why we use gates and binary logic in electrical computer systems?

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I understand your hesitation to read the books based on the premise of this article, but there is a lot of story complexity for why they created this computer that the article doesn't touch on. The scene is still perhaps a little cheesy, but it isn't entirely unwarranted.

It's also a small part of the story. I wouldn't judge the entire trilogy based on thinking this one scene is really stupid.

But it wasn't a human computer. It was a trisolarian computer made up of trisolarians that were alien beings that had the ability to do things like hyper-fast communication and always be truthful. Both of those traits could actually make for a viable computer system whereas humans obviously would not. I can see how you may have thought that though because in the 3 body problem simulation "game" in the book the trisolarians are represented as humans (the author does point out the difference though)

On a side note, is our system of government really all that different from a mass human computer?

Yeah but why use binary? Why not communicate through language rather than binary?

Yes, our system of government is a mass human computer that would be made really inefficient if everyone could only communicate in binary and if we restricted one persons functional processing to output that of a single logical gate.

That's definitely a good point; language would likely be much better than binary unless the aliens had some special capacity for binary (which I'm pretty sure was not the case)

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