Close. Let's explore the illusion management
thing. Exploring a world set up with devices
is part of the answer, but it is still a bit
too static and predictable. Let's look at how
God does it (ok, inflate your shoes, Bozos!).
Let's say God does what some theologians think
and sets up the universe, then walks away. It
is awfully difficult to make a story where all
of the characters have free will. Let's pretend
for the moment that problems of memory management,
loading and unloading objects, are behind us.
Free will is a problem. The god-endowed agent,
ostensibly a user with free will, gets to go
where they want to. Since they will not necessarily
do anything interesting or entertaining for God,
God has to intervene without being seen. How does God get them to
go where God wants and still maintain an illusion
of free will? Devils and angels.
Now despite what they wear in the nether or upper
regions, on Earth, they have to look like something
that belongs there or they break the illusion. Mind you,
an environment can be normal or phantasmagoric, but
unless you make it consistent, the illusion falls
apart and like Daffy Duck in the cartoon, you find
out about Bugs. So the first part of illusion
maintenance is a consistent world. If time goes
forward, time always goes forward. If there are
no dragons, there are no dragons. God sets it up
and lets it run. However, to keep it directed,
God puts in Devils and angels... God cannot intervene,
no deus ex machinas, but God makes the devils and
angels purposeful and they can get in and out of
the world at will.
Devils try to keep a character from getting to
the goal set by God. Angels try to keep a
character on track. Both try to undo the work
of the other. All the time. Spy vs Spy.
So we need a world where:
1. Devils and angels can watch the estate of mortals.
2. Devils and angels can plan.
3. Devils and angels can insert themselves into the
scene and can even set up the scene (stage offline)
but cannot do anything outside of the rules God sets up.
4. Devils can set up a mortal to do themselves in and
angels can set up a mortal to save themselves, but neither
can kill or save a mortal directly. Free will, or the
illusion of free will, is the prime directive, so to speak.
The idea of course, is active agents, feedback and
the ability to prestage JIT environments. The
world creator has to define a consistent world and
actually has to create a hierarchy if you will of such
agents with goal seeking agendas. How complex you can
get depends on your imagination, and you may have to
do some load balancing to figure out just how often
an angel or devil can appear and in what guises. They
should always have guises because they are actually
just abstractions of dualities. By maintaining a
complete set of all the dualities, you can make
sure that sequences and parallel events have inputs
which adjust intensities of events. Guises can
be anything from another character to a banana peel.
Consider the way SMIL creates presentations and ask
yourself what you could do if you could use a language
like XSLT to create objects offline, then insert them
into the event sets dynamically. Use XML to persist
states the same way coarse transaction systems persist
states and for the same reason. State maintenance
using a means that enables you to send update grams
to lots of machines is what you want in case you
want to play this with more than one player. Also,
remember that you are not allowed to rollback a transaction;
you can apply a mediating next transaction and that
is where the devils and angels come in.
If you really want to get wild, devils and angels
can not only read the mortal, they can read each
other and play tit for tat. Again, you have to
load balance so you will need some restrictions
on what they can do to each other and that,
most likely means that in accordance with the
rules of illusion maintenance, they are subject
to the rules of the guise they use.
Len
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard
Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
-----Original Message-----
From: Niclas Olofsson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
I agree with len here. One thing that popped up in my mind is this old
saying that "What if we had all the money in the world, all the time,
and all the developers. What kind of software couldn't we build then?"
