Assume they are in a simulation—why would it have an event buffer created able to compute time travel at all, and why pick 6 human hours (equivalent) as the magic number constant for it?
Why not? I think it’d be kind of cool to simulate a universe with magic and I’d feel altogether clever if I could implement time travel in it. :)
OK, simulating time travel for the hell of it sounds good, I still question the buffer limit idea:
“Simulated time travel now working, but what should we set the Horological Constant value to?”
“Dunno. Three years? A thousand years? Just enough time to undo saying something rude? MAX_INT seconds? AVAILABLE_MEM? User configurable?”
“Oh whatever, it’s time to go home, I’ll just put six simulated hours and be done with it. Shall I start locking up?”
That would be a disappointing reason for the 6 hour limit, and an unconvincing way to make the universe work so that the plot works. I hope the 6 hour limit is either not real, or something more interesting.
My first hypothesis would be simple processing complexity. Time travel is complicated. It is the kind of problem that grows ridiculously with time and space. The programmer has been able to invent an algorithm that simplifies it for low dimensionality but even with that algorithm higher order time travel would still take too much time on the given hardware.
Second: the programmer initially programmed the buffer in to allow for short term time processing. Things like the soda that prompts you to drink, spell dodging time hop magic, etc. It didn’t even occur to him that the wizards would find a way to exploit the mechanism for long term use.
Another possible reason to have a time-buffer in a world simulator (which, btw, I don’t believe the HP:MORverse is) is that the simulation doesn’t actually do everything in real time.
Rather, you may have situations where process A and process B are defined as taking the same number of simulated time-slices, but process B takes more actual time to simulate for whatever reason, and so the simulation of process A is halted until process B catches up. (This presumes that it’s not possible to reallocate simulated processes across simulating resource threads with arbitrarily fine granularity.)
Which means that at any given real-world moment, some parts of the simulation are at timeslice T, some parts are at timeslice T+1, and so forth. The six-hour limit might simply reflect the typical spread, and simulated time-travel might be a hacking of the system that is bound by that spread, rather than an explicitly simulated capability with an explicitly simulated upper bound.
Something like this is true of the only reality-simulating system we know of, namely our own brains. For example, color phi is a kind of simulated time travel where, in response to a perceived event E1 at time T, your brain constructs an illusory event E2, which you experience as occurring before T. This works because different parts of your brain construct your experience of time T at different rates, and tag those parts as occurring at T; the experience of simultaneity is constructed by your brain.
Which means that at any given real-world moment, some parts of the simulation are at timeslice T, some parts are at timeslice T+1, and so forth.
If the six-hours is to avoid too much time-skew, it’s a hack and one would expect better from simulation-builders.
There are plenty of ways to efficiently calculate differing time-space regions, using lazy evaluation or equivalents thereof. For example, the famous Hashlife algorithm for Conway’s Game of Life does exactly that—different regions can be billions or trillions of generations apart thanks to memoization. Lazy evaluation proper allows weird techniques like the reverse state monad or circular programming (aka time-traveling).
I hope the 6 hour limit is either not real, or something more interesting.
It may be that the limit is not due to the physics itself but because of the intervention of an early wizard. Unbounded time travel is one of the most powerful abilities imaginable. The first witch to exploit this and take ultimate power would obviously want to prevent others from overthrowing her. It would be in her best interest to find a way to put constraints on the powers of others. Longer than six hour anomalies may well trigger destructive countermeasures.
Why not? I think it’d be kind of cool to simulate a universe with magic and I’d feel altogether clever if I could implement time travel in it. :)
OK, simulating time travel for the hell of it sounds good, I still question the buffer limit idea:
“Simulated time travel now working, but what should we set the Horological Constant value to?”
“Dunno. Three years? A thousand years? Just enough time to undo saying something rude? MAX_INT seconds? AVAILABLE_MEM? User configurable?”
“Oh whatever, it’s time to go home, I’ll just put six simulated hours and be done with it. Shall I start locking up?”
That would be a disappointing reason for the 6 hour limit, and an unconvincing way to make the universe work so that the plot works. I hope the 6 hour limit is either not real, or something more interesting.
My first hypothesis would be simple processing complexity. Time travel is complicated. It is the kind of problem that grows ridiculously with time and space. The programmer has been able to invent an algorithm that simplifies it for low dimensionality but even with that algorithm higher order time travel would still take too much time on the given hardware.
Second: the programmer initially programmed the buffer in to allow for short term time processing. Things like the soda that prompts you to drink, spell dodging time hop magic, etc. It didn’t even occur to him that the wizards would find a way to exploit the mechanism for long term use.
Another possible reason to have a time-buffer in a world simulator (which, btw, I don’t believe the HP:MORverse is) is that the simulation doesn’t actually do everything in real time.
Rather, you may have situations where process A and process B are defined as taking the same number of simulated time-slices, but process B takes more actual time to simulate for whatever reason, and so the simulation of process A is halted until process B catches up. (This presumes that it’s not possible to reallocate simulated processes across simulating resource threads with arbitrarily fine granularity.)
Which means that at any given real-world moment, some parts of the simulation are at timeslice T, some parts are at timeslice T+1, and so forth. The six-hour limit might simply reflect the typical spread, and simulated time-travel might be a hacking of the system that is bound by that spread, rather than an explicitly simulated capability with an explicitly simulated upper bound.
Something like this is true of the only reality-simulating system we know of, namely our own brains. For example, color phi is a kind of simulated time travel where, in response to a perceived event E1 at time T, your brain constructs an illusory event E2, which you experience as occurring before T. This works because different parts of your brain construct your experience of time T at different rates, and tag those parts as occurring at T; the experience of simultaneity is constructed by your brain.
If the six-hours is to avoid too much time-skew, it’s a hack and one would expect better from simulation-builders.
There are plenty of ways to efficiently calculate differing time-space regions, using lazy evaluation or equivalents thereof. For example, the famous Hashlife algorithm for Conway’s Game of Life does exactly that—different regions can be billions or trillions of generations apart thanks to memoization. Lazy evaluation proper allows weird techniques like the reverse state monad or circular programming (aka time-traveling).
It may be that the limit is not due to the physics itself but because of the intervention of an early wizard. Unbounded time travel is one of the most powerful abilities imaginable. The first witch to exploit this and take ultimate power would obviously want to prevent others from overthrowing her. It would be in her best interest to find a way to put constraints on the powers of others. Longer than six hour anomalies may well trigger destructive countermeasures.