Civilization Number 184 was destroyed by the stacked gravitational attractions of a tri-solar syzygy. This civilization had advanced to the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.

In this civilization, Newton established nonrelativistic classical mechanics. At the same time, due to the invention of calculus and the Von Neumann architecture computer, the foundation was set for the quantitative mathematical analysis of the motion of three bodies.

After a long time, life and civilization will begin once more, and progress through the unpredictable world of Three Body.

We invite you to log on again.

— Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

― Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack

Complete Information and Stable Configurations in the Three Body Problem

[Configurable three-body simulation from AnyLogic.](https://cloud.anylogic.com/assets/embed?modelId=f1999d97-8de2-4804-9940-5ae261d7ad86)

Configurable three-body simulation from AnyLogic.

<aside> ✴️ From Complete information (Wikipedia):

In economics and game theory, complete information is an economic situation or game in which knowledge about other market participants or players is available to all participants. The utility functions (including risk aversion), payoffs, strategies and "types" of players are thus common knowledge. Complete information is the concept that each player in the game is aware of the sequence, strategies, and payoffs throughout gameplay. Given this information, the players have the ability to plan accordingly based on the information to maximize their own strategies and utility at the end of the game.

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<aside> ✴️ From Three-body problem (Wikipedia):

In physics and classical mechanics, the three-body problem is the problem of taking the initial positions and velocities (or momenta) of three point masses and solving for their subsequent motion according to Newton's laws of motion and Newton's law of universal gravitation. ... Unlike two-body problems, no general closed-form solution exists, as the resulting dynamical system is chaotic for most initial conditions, and numerical methods are generally required.

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The basic premise of Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem is that an intelligent and technologically superior alien civilization has discovered that Earth’s solar system is habitable for their species through radio-based communication with a lone, disillusioned astronomer at a Chinese astronomical observatory. The aliens are called Trisolarans because they live on a planet within a chaotic trinary star system called Alpha Centauri that is based on the actual but non-chaotic trinary star system by the same name. Trisolaris, the planet upon whch the Trisolarans have lived on for around two hundred “civilizations” worth of eras, is subject to the chaotic fluctuations of extreme hot and cold climates due to the chaotic nature of the triple star system — the co-opting of Earth’s single star system from humans represents the Trisolarans’ only feasible chance of civilizational salvation through cosmic stability.

The three-body problem is a problem in that there’s no closed-form solution [*Wiki: ”meaning there is no general solution that can be expressed in terms of a finite number of standard mathematical operations”*] and requires numerical computation in order to solve for the system’s state at time, T — while analytic approximations are possible sans sequential computation, errors compound and a true solution requires sequential computation). Back on Earth, another three body system is entering a stable, non-chaotic configuration by virtue of each of these three bodies being able to respond to the other two bodies’ positioning in a way that dumb star mass is unable to.

[From Goldman Sachs: Cloud Quarterly 1Q20]: This data isn’t up to date (Q1’20) and primarily presented to convey the idea of AWS/Azure/GCP as masses with velocity. Although revenue is more “flow” than “stock”, we can imagine a similar bubble chart being made with business enterprise value (or segment market cap through [segment revenue or earnings] x [comped multiples]) as “mass”.

[From Goldman Sachs: Cloud Quarterly 1Q20]: This data isn’t up to date (Q1’20) and primarily presented to convey the idea of AWS/Azure/GCP as masses with velocity. Although revenue is more “flow” than “stock”, we can imagine a similar bubble chart being made with business enterprise value (or segment market cap through [segment revenue or earnings] x [comped multiples]) as “mass”.

[From Synergy]: A somewhat more recent (Q1’21) size v growth chart for reference.

[From Synergy]: A somewhat more recent (Q1’21) size v growth chart for reference.

While it’ll be a long, long time before the hyperscalers’ R&D investments into chip design and TSMC’s investments into chip manufacturing can produce anything like a pair of sophons [in The Three Body Problem sophons are a fictional pair of quantumly-entangled supercomputers made from dimensionally unfolding, etching circuits, and dimensonally refolding single protons], the cloud hyperscalers have the next best thing — millions upon millions of globally-networked servers. Although the hyperscalers are unable to achieve the perfect information gathering abilities of the Trisolaran’s sophons, for the purposes of analyzing their competitors’ strategic moves, each of three Big Three hyperscalers are more than capable.