[vworld-tech] Ultimate MMO Platform

[Jim Purbrick]

Very interesting. I started thinking about the idea of multiple nodes cross
checking each other when I first came across Crosby's P2P ideas, but hadn't
encountered any quorum mechanics based solutions. I'll check this out. 

The brick wall I came up with was how to deal with large numbers of systems
that are all trying to colaboratively cheat? If you require multiple nodes
to perform the same calculations and agree on the solutions, what if they
all agree to conspire to cheat? I suppose the answer might be in 'consensual
systems', if enough people try to cheat, they are no longer cheating, just
democratically changing the rules.

After lots of thinking about this stuff the best solution I've seen so far
is the NWN approach of players nominating players that they trust. Yes it
requires human effort and yes it probably isn't immune to people pretending
to be a trusted player etc., but it's being used right now.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: J C Lawrence [mailto:claw at kanga.nu]
> Wouldn't the notions of quorum mechanics, such as the degenerate cases
> where both ends of a transaction cross-check/sanity_check the 
> results of
> a computation or current game state directly contradict this? 
>  They are
> 'consensual systems' which yet offer (potentially) strong 
> definition and
> correctness controls[1].