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• brucecohenpdx commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Anonymous | May 15, 2013 23:53 | Reply : I've been thinking about "Palimpsest" off & on for awhile now, and I've noticed some implications of the way the timegate works. The 14 millisecond minimum window for opening & closing a wormhole has a major effect on the tactics of time battles. It means that mass movements are impossible; groups have to jump in & out of a spatial volume in ripples rather than en masse. And there are probably techniques for hogging the slots in a space-time volume if you know, in some sense "before" your opponent, where/when the...
• Jocelyn Ireson-Paine commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  (Yes, there's more to this story than meets the eye. ... Just how the time machine got created is outside the frame of the novella/first third of the novel. Ditto the purpose of the ultimate library. Although I can spoiler it a little by saying the continents of memory diamond that Pierce discovers are just the low-latency cache for a much bigger structure.) I didn't understand why the Stasis would bother with all the eon-spanning cosmological engineering and the other efforts to preserve humanity. If the universe is going to become uninhabitable in the end anyway, what's the point? I...
• Jocelyn Ireson-Paine commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  "Palimpsest" reads as if it was heavily influenced by The End of Eternity. I suppose Honorable Scholar Yarrow is an allusion to Asimov's Educator Yarrow: Educator Yarrow was at a desk talking to them. Harlan could remember Yarrow well: a small, intense man, with ruddy hair in disarray, freckled forearms, and a look of loss in his eyes. (It wasn't uncommon, this look of loss in the eyes of an Eternal — the loss of home and roots, the unadmitted and unadmittable longing for the one Century he could never see.)...
• Jocelyn Ireson-Paine commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  That [the idea that a computer is limited by its programming] is a very naive view of software. I urge you to take a look at the field of machine learning; you might be in for some surprises. Because everyone knows about evolution's power to generate novelty, those computational learning methods called "genetic algorithms" that are based on evolution are a good starting point. Look at the wonderful creatures that Karl Sims evolved under a simulated physics. Papers explaining how he did this are linked at the bottom of the same page....
• Greg. Tingey commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  brucecohenpdx @ 150 As Zelazny described a temporal fugue battle in "Creatures of Light and Darkness" I've read that SO many times & I'm still having problems - it's a little-kmown masterpiece! Err.. the allocation & abrogation/acquisition/annullment (I'm on an alliteration jag!) of time-slots, whether 1 or 14-millisecond, reminds me of something that just popped up on a subsequent thread: The Josephus problem - of finding the survivior from a multiple-start & all the others get "eliminated", one way or another. Is this perhaps relevant?...