42 Votes in Poll
Which one is which?
@Orbit Newflavor, the one on the left is the closed timeline curve computer from the Xeelee sci fi series, it's a temporal devices that work using FTL data that travel back in time and answer questions before they're asked. It breaks down problems into pieces and recursively solve them with time travel without the temporal paradox allowing for acausality. It brute force their way through every potential calculation, then send the correct answer back in time once it's been found, it do not wear out because they send the answer back before they even need to run on energy supply.
The right is path to victory which is pretty self explanatory.
I chose the one I am the least bit knowledgeable with
Path to Victory. I'm not sure I understand the Processor. Is it an artifact? Is it verse-specific, that is, can you only scan the future of the verse you are in? One of the problems I want to solve is escaping our own gravity-well verse, so PTV is, perhaps, a safer bet.
@Two-of-Six, well it's similar to path to victory that it gets give you the answers to a outcome but before questions even take place that how fast it is, CTCs Device work under the presupposition that "basic Xeelee verse time travel is acasual", which means killing a person in the past doesn't delete him from the present, he just continues to exist in the present, causality doesn't exist, due to configuration space and all that. CTC processors work on this principle, there is no temporal paradox, the information appears out of nothing from a future that never was. To sum it up it like mixing coil timeline splitting power, contessa PTV and phir se time transport in one device that can be linked inside a brain or a machine.
So the processor is a literal computer processor that essentially achieves computational supertasking via acausal time travel?
@AzQth, yes it's a computer that brute-force calculates information before sending said information back in time in a series of time-loops.
Time loops hmm? So either getting the answers to questions that one would've asked before one asked them related to the situation as of right now, or have a goal in mind and to be given capabilities to get to said goal. Do I have that right?
I think they each have some key advantages over the other.
The CTC-processor can effectively run as many calculations as it needs to in zero time, thus basically having as much processing power as it needs for any given operation, while PTV (if we're treating it like its in-verse counterpart) uses a multidimensional crystalline computer to do its predictive algorithms - this is very large, but technically finite.
The CTC-processor can also presumably interface with existing technology, so you could input and output data from/to a computer, while PTV interfaces solely with the user's mind to give its outputs.
It would also use next to no energy, since functionally speaking, it never actually runs beyond checking if it's recieved data from the future and returning that (because all of the actual calculations were done in futures that didn't happen because the result was sent back in time). In principle, the rate at which it can produce outputs to problems is solely limited by the rate at which data can be input and output to and from it (as in, if you can input requests and the relevant data for 10,000 problems every second, and retrieve the outputs it gives back at the same rate, then it will solve 10,000 problems every second. If you can do the inputs and take the outputs for 10,000,000,000,000 problems every second, then it will solve 10,000,000,000,000 problems every second).
But here come the problems:
It has no way of taking in data by itself. The data must be input, so you are limited by the data you can provide the processor. PTV, on the other hand, seems to have access to multidimensional, planet-wide scans with which to supply its predictive algorithms.
You would also likely need to provide the actual programs to run on it; unless it comes pre-programmed with some kind of general-purpose, 'do everything' program, you would need to create a program for any given use case, which not only requires knowledge of programming and the thing you're programming for, but presumably also requires some specifics for the CTC-processor (e.g., breaking the program up into millisecond intervals).
In the face of these two major problems, it seems to me like the CTC-processor, if placed into the hands of a normal person, would be rather useless, or at least far, far from its full potential. On the other hand, PTV just works. You select a goal, and it gives you all the steps necessary to achieve it, even helping you follow them to perfection if you want it to.
What do you think?
What do you think?