association-list

I don’t really have a lot to say about this book that hasn’t been said more ele­gantly else­where. I liked it, but that was mostly on the strength of Charlie’s engage­ment with nascent tech­nol­ogy and the things that one might do with it, and the fever­ish den­sity of ideas which he man­ages to put across. This mostly got me over the indif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and warmed-​​over plot. I really liked it when Stross wrote about things other than spies, but I sym­pa­thize with the dif­fi­culty of trying to write a pos­i­tive near future sce­nario with a world impact­ing plot that doesn’t involve geopo­lit­i­cal intrigue somehow.

That said, read­ing other people’s reviews and talk­ing to people about his books, I’ve real­ized that I have prob­lems with Stross­ian plots that other people do not have, and this one espe­cially. As a coder, I have a lot of trou­ble just sort of accept­ing the tech­nob­a­b­ble at face value.

Don’t get me wrong. Most people in SF and in fic­tion in gen­eral don’t engage with com­put­ers and net­work­ing or their poten­tial well at all. I am glad that some­one is doing it, and gen­er­ally doing it so well. Stross’ spec­u­la­tions are fas­ci­nat­ing, and hon­estly I would buy a book that was just him blue-​​skying about the next twenty-​​five years of IT and com­put­ing. At the moment, no one is writ­ing more inter­est­ing SF about near future tech­nol­ogy. So most people should just stop here. It’s a good book, although not his strongest work. The fol­low­ing is most likely going to be the com­puter person equiv­a­lent of an under­sexed physics post-​​grad pick­ing apart a space opera for incon­sis­ten­cies. But what is the inter­net for if not to embar­rass our­selves in public?

I’ll address my pedan­tic con­cerns from least to great­est. There will be many spoilers.

• The glasses both­ered me. They are essen­tially magic, in a book set ten years in the future. From his glanc­ing descrip­tion, they would require major break­throughs in at least three and more likely five fields: Bat­tery energy den­si­ties, com­puter vision, and mate­ri­als sci­ence for starters, and pos­si­bly proces­sor design and low-​​power, high-​​bandwidth wire­less as well. Just ten years out for all of this? I would bet that we’ll have some­thing like these ten years from now, but they’ll almost cer­tainly be teth­ered to some­thing in your pocket for power and pro­cess­ing. I would love to be wrong, though. Fuck­ing bat­ter­ies. The com­puter vision aspect is the one that I really doubt will happen, though.

• The Zone, the dis­trib­uted plat­form upon which the gaming system in book runs, seems to me to be less over­am­bi­tious so much as just really inef­fi­cient. You’d need to over-​​provision so much in terms of stor­age and pro­cess­ing power that surely it would be cheaper to rent VMs in local colos and not have to worry about all of the client secu­rity issues. I am guess­ing that you’d need at least ten times as much horse­power to do it in an entirely dis­trib­uted fash­ion, and ulti­mately qual­ity of ser­vice would suffer. I just can’t imag­ine it work­ing, even with sym­met­ric 1Mbps broad­band to the pocket and mobile phones that are sixty times faster than those today, assum­ing that Moore’s law hasn’t bot­tomed out by then.
  
  Note that I don’t think that it’s impos­si­ble, I just don’t think that it’s as much of a mon­ey­maker as being able to charge a slightly higher price but be able to guar­an­tee levels of ser­vice and respon­sive­ness. The real gating fac­tors for these games are the graph­ics and the band­width, it’d be cheaper and safer just for some­one to start a com­pany that seeded cheap, trusted sim­u­la­tion nodes all around the world in colos with mas­sive band­width, expand­ing and col­laps­ing how many nodes each sim was run­ning on based on demand, and charg­ing for run­time only, espe­cially with the large amount of shared code infra­struc­ture that he seems to imply. You wouldn’t get the auto­matic scale-​​up in power that you would get as con­sumers grad­u­ally replaced their phones, but I think that the higher avail­abil­ity of servers and the abil­ity to actu­ally target how much horse­power you’d need would more than make up for it.
  
  Tan­gen­tially, dis­trib­uted file sys­tems and data­bases are of a much harder class of prob­lem than dis­trib­uted sim­u­la­tion with untrusted pro­cess­ing nodes, but some­one might figure that out at any point, so it’s not really fair to bet against it.

• Another thing that both­ered me about the zone was the common plat­form that allowed people to migrate avatars and items between games. But then I read an arti­cle about that today on Raph Koster’s site, so what do I know. We’re pretty close to the point at which large scale semi-​​distributed sim­u­la­tion stuff is mid­dle­ware, and I doubt that it’ll be long before some startup starts cap­tur­ing major market share by offer­ing common infra­struc­ture for MMOGs and Vir­tual Worlds and the big com­pa­nies stop both­er­ing to roll their own. I just didn’t think that the com­pa­nies would go for shar­ing or easy migra­tion, but per­haps I have too little faith.

• Per­haps I mis­un­der­stood the Scot­tish net­work infra­struc­ture that he described, but a national, wired inter­net back­bone that could be com­pro­mised by the expo­sure of a single one time pad? Huh? I know that Stross knows better than this. Unfor­tu­nately, major parts of the plot pivot on this, which made it kind of trou­ble­some for me. I’ll have to take another look to make sure that I have it right.

• The last thing that both­ered me was most cru­cial, I think, to the plot, as it’s what gets the whole ball rolling. The vaunted MMORPG Bank Heist. If some­one has already owned the game to the point that they can call up the bank accounts of random play­ers, why the hell do they need to announce this? Pre­sum­ably one could just vanish all of those items from people’s bank accounts with­out ever having to bother enter­ing the bank at all. Also, putting a bank in a PvP zone gen­er­ally doesn’t happen. Addi­tion­ally, making the bank struc­ture assaultable by people in the game is a much higher level of sim­u­la­tional fidelity than most game devel­op­ers would bother with.

So there you have it. I have bored even myself. Four or so ideas out of a couple of hun­dred that seemed sound to me. Unfor­tu­nately, some of them are quite impor­tant to the plot. I’m just antic­i­pat­ing talk­ing to some people about the book and coming up with an entirely dis­junct set of issues to talk about than some­one non-​​technical.