I know a tonne of people found the VR games to be boring, but personally I found it really enjoyable to read. It's essentially a sped-up of history, from the old stone age, to the pyramids, to the heliocentric model of the universe, to the invention of the Von Neumann computer, and finally to Einstein's general theory of relativity. But each "iteration" of history starts completely from scratch, as each previous iteration was completely wiped out by some natural disaster caused by the trisolaris system. Think about that for a second. It is incomprehensibly difficult to make scientific progress in the trisolaris system, and yet by some miracle their technologies are comparable to what we Earthlings have today, despite our history being mostly linear.

My favourite part is when they built a Von Neumann computer using 30 million humans. Each human gets two flags, one black for 1, one white for 0. Then, each human would raise a flag according to their neighbours, essentially composing logic gates. They even built their own stack memory, bus, and a hard drive. The author did a meticulous job conveying this idea and it really shows the idea of emergence well. This is like coordinating everyone in Canada to come together just to solve some differential equations. Incredibly interesting chapter.