ttfkad wrote:joevano wrote:you are probably never going to get close to the calculated light-second time but you will definitely never ever have a better lag time (because it is physically impossible to go faster than the speed of light [most likely, though some current findings may disprove that soon]
an out of the box type question would be;
when can we expect bzflag to incorporate "that stuff" which they find can travel faster than the speed of light...
I'd imagine that would take care of the lag problem!
There is a tremendous lag in servers when optical signal is treated to be sent to the next point in the line. The reason is that photons (light), which travel at light speed through optical fibers, are transformed into electrons in the servers and electrons do not travel at light speed. This always adds a few milliseconds at each router (not to mention queues, jobs, noise, and software that has be be run for the process to work). Electronics is comparatively slow in front of photonics.
"that stuff" that has been reported to apparently travel faster than light are some type of neutrinos (actually, a minuscule proportion of them), and there are serious doubts in the scientific community that the experiment is correct. And there are good reasons to think so. Besides, we will probably never be able to construct machines based on "neutrinonics" so to speak, so even if some of them can be faster than light, they will be of little use for communication. Neutrinos are among the most undetectable things out there, they hardly interact with matter. You cannot imagine the number of bits that would be lost if we used neutrinos instead of photons or electrons!
So forget it, we will have to live with lag as a part of the game

... at least until fully working optical computers can be built massively.
Don't let school interfere with your education.
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