From: rible@vorpal.ucsb.edu (Max Rible)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp
Subject: Re: SR: the Matrix (was: Controlling magicians)
Date: 16 Apr 92 00:26:59 GMT
Article-I.D.: ucsbcsl.4199

nigel@rs733.GSFC.NASA.Gov writes
> In article <RATINOX.92Apr13214022@splinter.coe.northeastern.edu>  
ratinox@meceng.coe.northeastern.edu (Richard Pieri/Stainless Steel Rat) writes:
> >>>>>> On 9 Apr 92 22:22:59 GMT, nigel@rs733.GSFC.NASA.Gov said:
> [my stuff about the Matrix being a massive distributed processing system]
> 
> >This isn't as bogus as you suppose. It's called ``distributed processing''
..
>               For the matrix to really be able to work this way
> you need either near instantaneous communication to at least a few
> sites (say everyone in your zone) or huge bandwidth and easily
> partitioned subsections to be processed.  The first is somewhat
> unlikely given that the speed of light is your limit and the second is
> possible but I don't know enough about how MPP systems work to tell if
> that would fly.  

In the way of thinking about Shadowrun computer technology I've come
up with, the bandwidth is incredible--- enough that you can send an
entire encoded, real-time simsense transmission across it easily
(that's the only way you can get sculpted environments), and the main
limitation is how fast your deck can process it. In fact, I make use
of a bit of research done at (I think) Bellcore that showed that it
was more economical on a high-enough-speed network to simply have, say
the Encyclopedia Britannica flashing past your terminal every three
seconds on the network--- so you can just wait for the right section
to go by and pick it out of the flow--- than it is to send a packet
down to a server and have it look up the section, then send another
packet back to you.  Now, by my lights, the whole bloody Matrix was
running like this by about 2020!  This is why the computer virus
was so deadly: only the largest corporations could afford to bring
their computers out of the Matrix and run without the support of
all the software floating out there.  PC's no longer have serious
operating systems: they just plug into the Matrix and call on the
current version of whatever program you want.

(The reason that they can do this is the hack I came up with to
explain why computing power *and* memory are measured by one 
statistic. I posit the development of a "pulse element", which
is a piece of reconfigurable logic. You want it to play flip-
flop, it becomes a flip-flop. You want that bunch to be an ALU,
it's an ALU. All computing in Shadowrun is now *massively*
parallel. One Megapulse is a decent amount of computing ability
for tiny tasks, and you need serious quantities to do serious
work. All computers are now compatible with all other computers
of at least their own size.)

> My assumption is that transmission rates would be very high but still
> take thousands if not millions of CPU cycles to go across the city.
> We'll assume for the moment that the path is some massive parallel
> connection and for each network clock cycle a sufficiently large
> packet is transfered.
> 

I figure that there are so many parallel communications bands that you
can probably shunt as much data as you can put onto the Matrix at one
go almost immediately.  The world's just going to get more and more
parallel...

> >                                                 Makes you think of all
> >kinds of internal power struggles, as one side says ``isolate us, or we're
> >vulnerable'' while the other says ``we need the power of the Matrix to do
> >our research.''
> 
> Yep...but the real rich guys can afford a few supercomputers.  You get
> the rough equivalent in a tight cluster of these guys as you would
> gettting cycles from the rest of Seattle...most of those systems are
> babies for accounting...just how much CPU capability do you need to
> run DBase XXXIX?
> >   --Rat
> Nigel Tzeng

One of the easiest ways to isolate yourself from the Matrix is to get
a big enough network to carry the amount of data circulating through
it. Then you open up a connection for about five seconds, let everything
in, then disconnect yourself.  This saves on hard storage.  It's still
not a cheap prospect...

The other thing I had to strain my brain to come up with is why data
files are so damn *big* by normal Shadowrun rules.  The answer is that
memory has just gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and storage
even more so, so there's no problem with using voice annotation, or
even video annotation in files, or throwing in huge graphics (rather
than regenerating them when you want to look at them) or other such
things; the reason that you can usually sum up that 90Mp file you
downloaded from that Red system in a few sentences is that there's
just that much dross present.  (It wasn't until I saw Microsoft Word
5.0 for the Mac that it really hit me that this would be a good way
of wasting space...)

Max