"'Those...battles. They're what might have occurred if...if what?'"
-The Forge, CHAPTER TWO, p. 21.
The sentient artificial entity has shown Raj moving images of events that he knows did not happen - like someone showing you Hitler being assassinated early in World War II.
Are the images merely simulated? Do they show what might have occurred, or what it is somehow known would have occurred, if some specified condition had differed?
See Probabilities Observed.
A computer screen shows a simulated alternative reality where an “anti-atomic ray” saved Krypton and where, in 1965, a spaceship from Earth, missing the Moon, reached Krypton, bringing Lois Lane as a stowaway. Need I go on? (There is more like this in the story.)
-copied from here.
Poul Anderson's Time Patrol agents cannot view the divergent timelines that they must prevent although occasionally they inadvertently visit them. Of course, they do use computers:
"'And I have my connections,' Everard said.
"The histories, the data files, the great coordinating computers, the experts of the Time Patrol. The knowledge that this is the proper configuration of a plenum that has powerful negative feedback. We've identified the random factor that could bring on an avalanching change; what we must do is damp it out."
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT pp. 607-608.
2 comments:
Paul:
In Roger Zelazny's Amber series, the narrator, Corwin, is part of a family with the ability to will themselves into alternate realities, which they call "shadows," typically changing things bit by bit (usually while traveling physically) until reaching a shadow with desired characteristics. One of Corwin's older brothers is a military genius with millennia of experience. Corwin says of him, "He has often journeyed from shadow to shadow, witnessing variation after variation on the same battle, with but slightly altered circumstances, in order to test his theories of warfare."
As far as what Center does is concerned, my impression is that it's just supposed to be an extrapolation of what's probable, not an actual look into the alternate reality. How Center gets some of the information on which it bases those extrapolations is one of the problematical aspects of the story....
Kaor, DAVID!
In your second paragraph above you beat me to what I was going to more or less say! (Smiles)
That is, Center gave Raj Whitehall possible extrapolations based on information the AI had.
Sean
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