Would the Three Body game be coded in Haskell?

#1

This is a side effect of Haskell Reddit being temporarily locked

I guess this is a plug for a different fandom I’m a part of, but they weren’t quite happy about it; they suggested Holy-C instead.

In the popular science fiction series The Three Body Problem (The Three-Body Problem | Three Body Problem Wiki | Fandom ), a group of revolutionaries, seeking to give the planet Earth to extraterrestrial aliens, produce a game as a recruiting scheme to recruit like-minded scientific and intellectual elites.

Given the time period of the story, roughly 2015, what would be the chances that the game would be coded in Haskell?

Honestly, I know there’s quite a few folks here who’d prefer the Earth-Trisolaris Organization being on the Haskell Foundation donor list instead of IOHK and other blockchain related firms, so please don’t take this as too offensive, only perhaps a bit puerile.

That said, every Haskeller would know that the three body problem is analytically unsolvable, and that there are more limited observational and statistical solutions to address the problem.

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#2

I would say extremely small, especially given the context of the game in the story. I don’t see an organization like the one in the book choosing a non mainstream language for a project like that, regardless of whichever language would be the platonic ideal to write it in.

Edit: “could” might be a more interesting question though since it would requiring looking at the Haskell ecosystem during that time and comparing it to what a game like that would require instead of just speculating on how likely a paramilitary group would be to choose it over something like C++.

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#3

The game which ETO used to recruit human elites was a VR game. So I assume it has an even higher frame rate requirement for a satisfactory game experience, compared to ordinary PC games. And given the timing, the nonmoving gc hasn’t even occurred yet, so I seriously doubt Haskell would be a fit to code that game.

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#4

I mean the only way they’d be using a VR game would be if technology were significantly more advanced in 2015; I think Oculus Rift was relatively primitive then, so perhaps we could throw some 2023 technologies in?

Speaking of VR, do you know how well SimulaVR is doing? They’re a start-up doing a Haskell-based VR WM over Linux. From their hardware specs, they’re targeting 90 Hz, so the maximum GC latency they can accept is 11 ms, implying that they’re abusing the hell out of linear types and non-moving GC.

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More generally, would ETO be attracted to Haskell? For outsiders, note that:

-The “Supreme Commander”, a figurehead, was a professor of astrophysics working at Tsinghua, or China’s equivalent of MIT (which was ranked first in the world briefly by US News for computer science until they changed their algorithm).

-One of the chief agents was part of a husband-and-wife research team whose spouse won double Nobels for advancements in quantum neuroscience

-Most of them are cosplaying in their VR game as “Von Neumann”, “Mozi” (A Chinese logician who formulated a version of Newton’s laws around 200 BC, known for siege weapons and militant pacifism), “Aristotle” (the female ETO agent mentioned above).

You’d imagine someone with a strong computer science background would naturally be a Haskeller given the academic background from which many of them hail, and given the fact that they are, well, terrorists, they would need Haskell’s promises of security. That said, they’d be screwed pretty badly by known holes in Cryptonite, but they’d also probably be the ones to patch it up.

And well, it’d be ironic if “Von Neumann” wanted to do away with Von Neumann machines, and “Aristotle” probably has an excess attachment to OOP.

A further counterargument is that most Haskellers wouldn’t evince the mentality of the ETO terrorists. By the second book of the series, the remaining ETOers (the moderates were arrested and unindoctrinated by the end of the first book) believed in the radical damnation of humanity; i.e, humans were so bad that they deserved to be destroyed.

Most Haskellers retain enthusiasm about the world, functional programming, and so on, and wouldn’t decide to help aliens conquer the planet because the uptake of functional programming as a paradigm is too slow.

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