Hacker News Reader

I always liked Peter F. Hamilton’s description of space battles from the Void trilogy that are all over in a fraction of a second.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_Trilogy

View on HN

It's the same in the Culture series. Near-God AI motherships manufacture combat psychopath AI ships by the thousand, which fight lower tech ships by overwritting their CPU caches with EM effectors (very advanced versions of phased array emitters) in milliseconds, taking them over for their side. Rarely it gets to anti-matter and particle beams.

Well, "Excession" from the same series gets its fair share of psychopath AIs using anti-matter and particle beams during a few nanoseconds fight.

From the same Iain Banks, "Against a Dark Background" features space battles where rules of engagement ban the use of AI-controlled weapons.

Or Stanislaw Lem from 1964's "The Invincible" where autonomous drone swarms take out all life and complex machinery. In the story, they evolve, but a lot of the swarm behavior is similar to killer bot drone swarms like from the clip above.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible

Reply on news.ycombinator.com