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In 1889, in honour of his 60th birthday King Oscar II of Sweden offered a rich prize to any scientist who could solve an ancient puzzle known as the Three Body Problem.

It was infuriatingly simple. If you know the mass, location, and velocity of three hypothetical objects, such as planets or moons, how can you predict the future path of their orbits?

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The answer, as the mathematician Henri Poincaré explained in the essay which won him the king’s prize, is that you cannot — at least not with the old-fashioned algebra and calculus known to him at the time. Despite a minor scandal over an error in Poincaré’s paper, that is basically where things stood for many years.

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Now, however, Chinese scientists have used one of the world’s fastest supercomputers to discover nearly 700 new unique and specific solutions to the Three Body Problem, according to their new paper in the journal Science China Physics Mechanics & Astronomy. Until now, there had only been about a dozen, mostly discovered over the last few years, each representing an orbit pattern that repeats and never leads to collision. There may be an infinite number of these solutions still waiting to be found, but there is no general solution that works in all cases.