From: Robin Lee Powell (rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org)
Date: Thu Dec 30 2010 - 00:20:10 MST
I really didn't expect this to be hard, but even rec.arts.sf.written
failed (
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/browse_thread/thread/70be22b57022a059#
)
I read this on the web. I *think* it was a short story; at most
novelette length. This was within the last 5 years or so.
Basically, it's the future, humans have done lots and lots of
intelligence enhancement; each generation is smarter than the one
before. Then we find a planet with alien ruins. There is a ship
sent there. For reasons I can no longer remember, one of the people
(male?) on the ship tries to destroy the ruins, and another tries to
stop her (pretty sure female). She is younger, and hence smarter,
than him, so he ends up taking lots of heavy-side-effect nootropics
to keep up with her. The war is fought almost entirely by 3-D
printed robots from the ships machine shops.
The emphasis is very much on intelligence: that a standard deviation
of IQ is going to determine the results of any strategy game
(probably mostly true, given equal experience) and that war is
basically that (also mostly true in this case, since the robots
won't freak out and run).
-Robin
-- http://intelligence.org/ : Our last, best hope for a fantastic future. Lojban (http://www.lojban.org/): The language in which "this parrot is dead" is "ti poi spitaki cu morsi", but "this sentence is false" is "na nei". My personal page: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/rlp/
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