[MUD-Dev] Time travel and Logging

[Jon A. Lambert]

On  6 Jan 98 at 15:49, Ling wrote:
>
> I read a short story either by Asimov or Philip K. Dick about time travel.
> This historian knew such a machine existed and wanted to have one of his
> own for observing the past.  Anyway, to cut a short story shorter: the
> twist in the end was that the machine could only view the past 100 years,
> however, it could be used for viewing the past 0.1 second so in effect, it
> could to observe the now anywhere, anyhow.
> 

Oooo!  Besides being an good short story, it poses an interesting problem 
for JC's time travel:  

Bubba the loathesome troll deposits his loaded hankerchiefs seemingly 
randomly about the mud world, yet in strategic places.  Assume that no 
one in their right mind would wish to pick up and own one of these items 
and that their decay rate is rather slow since the contents are rather 
noxious even to the vilest of parasites.  Bubba's player owner takes 
full advantage of free user programming and proceeds to write many macros;
each of which time-travels about 5 seconds into the past into each object
and "watches" for about 5 seconds.  In theory, Bubba would have established 
a complete strategic and well-disguised monitoring system with a mere 5 
second delay, between "camera" switches.  

Well maybe I shouldn't have said problem, since many things that I might 
consider problems are JC's "interesting and desireable side-effects". ;)

--
Jon A. Lambert
"Everything that deceives may be said to enchant" - Plato