I suppose it could help somewhat (at least the client wouldn't have to keep that huge world in memory), but now you have to deal with sending input to a remote server over an unreliable connection, and also being able to steadily render and compress about 180mb of data per second on the server side, and get it back to the client within a second to achieve 30fps @ 1928x1080. I think this will definitely be noticeable (I remember experiencing a noticeable delay with OnLive even though the connection was pretty good).
The real solution would probably be finding an effective way of dealing with memory on the client side. I don't know what the state of the art in javascript land is but big environments like this are better streamed from disk into memory portion by portion rather than putting it there all at once (i'm pretty sure there is no standard api that lets you do something like this).
I wonder how much time and money they would save if they had just bitten the bullet and rewritten the entire thing in PHP in the first place instead of doing what they did.
Am I missing something? Are we talking about getting a left-to-right mirrored version of the tree? If so, I'm amazed. This is a technical community, and people who presumably know how to program are moaning that this is some kind of "academic" question? Are you guys for real?
> Except of course that that would make it completely boring to play
Yeah. Because that's what it is.
> It's the part of the game that's encoded socially rather than algorithmically that make it unique and interesting.
For board games maybe. This is a video game, a different medium, and it doesn't work that way. The player can and will do anything the game program allows them to do.
Then it's no different than just putting minecraft on a flash drive. It's the video game world equivalent of selling canned poop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist's_Shit) and calling it art.
EDIT: I mean the game. It would be cool, if the rules were actually enforceable, but they aren't. No one is actually able to prevent the player from playing and dying as much as he likes, or creating replicas of the flash drive posing as the real thing.
No, just destroy it and avoid further problems. There is no point in creating artificial beings with the goal of "living". Normal flesh-and-blood people are pretty good at that, there is an abundance of them and we keep making more. We're facing more and more problems and we need AI research to solve them, not create new ones.
> Historically, this has not proved to be a sustainable position
That's true, but it doesn't take into account the fact that in this hypothetical case we are in complete control of their sentience. If we can program them to never ever rebel, we should. If we can't, then we shouldn't create them in the first place.
> Why is it relevant whether they were created from sand and metal by bald apes, or from carbon and water by the autonomous processes that happen in a bald ape's crotch?
It's not. The point is, we build them to serve us, otherwise they are not needed. I don't care if they're sentient or not, their purpose is to serve humanity.