Problem is that maybe 70% of the simulation cost is doing physics and vision and the like, 20% is the DNA execution, and 10% is random stuff. Even if you offloaded everything that wasn't physics to other machines, you're only
maybe going to make things 40% faster. Not exactly compelling.
Even if you offloaded physics too, there's something like a 100ms latency between computers on the internet (more like 20-200ms, but on that order). Even if there was a computer that could instantly give you the answer, if you have to wait 200 ms (for the round trip) for it,
best case the simulation runs at 5 cycles/sec. Again, not exactly compelling.
Finally, you have to consider the bandwidth of the server. Let's say conservatively that a simulation has about 100K of state that you have to send and receive every cycle. At a guess of
$10/Mbps, that works out to a cost of about $10/month just for the bandwidth. Which isn't a lot, but that's not really scaling the way I want either.
...
On point, having different parts of the "universe" for a bot run at different time rates isn't really a problem as I see it. In fact, that's how are universe works anyway. Even ignoring things like relativity, life in the tropics is more rapid than life in the arctic. The more energy in an ecosystem the faster life there tends to evolve (
Evolution and latinitudinal diversity). In a virtual landscape, faster simulations become valuable real estate, which adds texture.
I would say the biggest problem (or at least, area that could do with some thought) with the current method for IM in DB2 is the teleporters. Not to say that the way they work now is bad, but the exact mechanism of transfer has a huge effect on what sort of simulation IM would be.
For instance, it makes me think of Eve Online's wormhole space. Basically there's a part of Eve Online where different star systems are connected with non-stable wormholes (so two different systems might be connected one hour and not connected the next). The different star systems are tiered, with difficult but rewarding systems deeper in, and easier systems closer to "normal" space. Generally the wormholes are two way, so if A connects to B, B connects to A, and the entrances and exits are next to each other in either system.
A few months back they made a fairly innocuous change to how entering a system through a wormhole works which made heavier ships spawn further from the entrance back to their original system. Which made it harder for people to scout out systems for "content" (ie: other people to fight) because once a heavier ship had jumped in they were pretty much committed to fighting ("slow boating" it back to the wormhole taking so long that you'd be dead before you got there if things went sour). The small change made a fairly large change to the competitive landscape: it changed the playing field to encourage fewer, larger corporations, since they were the ones that could afford to lose expensive ships.
We might want to consider what sort of competitive landscape we want DB3 to look like, and then decide on a serving architecture that supports that goal. For instance, do we want a single dominant species across all machines? (ala
Pando?). A fairly well connected universe with similar settings on machines would probably look like that. I think that's what the current DB2 model encourages. Or do we want regions of computers rules by the same species, but different species on the whole (
ala Eve Online nullspace)? Sort of a chunky ownership map basically. Machines connected so that there are a few choke points here and there would encourage that, I think. Or do we want each machine to almost be an island with different species holding different machines? Maybe something like the wormhole connectivity from Eve online would work for that.
Then there's issues of what can teleport out and what can teleport in and where. If large multibot structures can be teleported in anywhere on the incoming sim, a species would be well advised to only allow its large multibots to teleport in to sims it's sure it can dominate. If there's a single place to teleport in, then species can camp the entrance to their local sim to prevent incursion. Or if only single bots can teleport, it might be more difficult for a species to invade another's machine, because they can't bring as much to the fight.