Chapter 6 is in the queue. We get a glimpse into how the world works and a chance to meet the creators of the game in this chapter.
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Building a gamelit world is both fun and challenging. This chapter gives me a bit of a chance to geek out as I get a chance to speculate on the distributed system challenges that would drive the design of a virtual reality game. Two interesting research findings stood out as I was thinking about this part of the world:
<p>Even today we can basically create dense enough displays that they have more pixels than a human eye can detect. So in theory, we should have all the network bandwidth we need to get you video indistinguishable from reality. But only if we knew where you were looking. Getting you enough pixels for anywhere you might look is still challenging. But if somehow, we could move enough rendering resources and enough data about the possible objects close to your eyes--somewhere where we could tell where you are focused and adjust what we rendered--then virtual reality might be within reach. The challenge is edge computation and latency, not bandwidth. Yeah, bandwidth can make up for that somewhat, at least until you want your reality to be responsive.
<p>One year, MIT held a Time Travel Conference. It was mostly silly, but there was some research presented. According to one presentation, the CIA funded some research into rewriting history. The conclusion of that research was that rewriting history was in the general case as computationally expensive as letting history happen the first time. I have no idea whether the CIA actually funded that research, or whether that was a real paper. If not, it could be: the government funds all sorts of random things. The conclusion is almost certainly true though when you think about how computability works and things like Rice's Theorem. As with all things computability and Turing, the words general case are important: shortcuts may exist in interesting subsets of the problem. Let's think about what that means for the genre convention of time compression in gamelit worlds for a few minutes. Or you could just go ahead and read chapter 6.
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