388) A divine message 20.7.87 The following MAIL message was received today by a member of the Computing Service, supposedly from GOD%CAM.PHX@HEAVEN. It has been copied to INFO.WORLD.CURRENT.STATUS, and appears here by kind permission of the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. World Development Status July 1987 ------------------------ This is a standard reply to PRAYers and private meditations about the World, the time spent composing individual revelations in essentially the same vein having become unreasonable. All prayers are however heard and noted by the appropriate beings. The World is currently being accorded minimal divine effort, on the grounds that (a) it is by and large good enough, and (b) there are more important things to be done (plans for Project Armageddon are well advanced, assuming that money can be raised to pay for it). It is recognised that there are definite deficiencies in the present World, but the known deficiencies cannot be remedied easily, and are deemed to be such as we can live with. The World does receive maintenance in emergencies, when it appears to have gone very badly wrong, and when other Universe developments definitely require it. Otherwise, the only improvements come as a result of good will in saints' spare time, and there is little enough of the latter. -------------------------------------------------------------- Some known deficiencies ----------------------- The following list is by no means the totality of known human problems, but includes some common subjects of complaint. Failure to arrange Life so as to minimise the discomfort This is often expressed as "I started life with parameters xxx, and noticed somebody else's with less restrictive parameters, whereas my life became more painful". The algorithm used for finding the minimum of misery in the world is fundamentally incorrect. (Oh, you guessed?) Although for the most part it gets near enough the right answer, occasionally it is significantly wrong. The algorithm does, however, have the virtue of being cheap to run. None the less, the Trinity recognises that it was a mistake, and would in principle like it rectified (by someone else, of course). The code is, however, complicated, and would need rewriting in its entirety, together with all the debugging that this would imply. Failure to live up to promises The system-supplied moral values are estimates, not promises, and this is a fundamental pillar of the whole apparatus. Although there is some very substantial and complicated dogma in support of living up to these estimates, there is no actual commitment to worldly reward for virtue. The only commitment is to reward after the life has finished executing. Very rich people are seen prospering. True. Occasionally these are likely to have to pay dearly for it. More commonly these people got up early in the day and took advantage of their opportunities when there was no other eligible person to do so, and the alternative would have been to waste natural resources. Some effort is made to minimise this when it is expected that more deserving people will probably arrive later. Lack of life sequencing facilities Again, the Trinity recognises the desirability of giving people a second life, but both the semantic design and the implementation are complicated. There is no doubt that this would be a major development project. In the absence of these facilities the recommended technique for those who must have automatic life sequencing is to have each life act as the parent of its successor. Various levels of sophistication can be built privately on top of this, and users should be warned to avoid well known pitfalls, such as accidental over-production of offspring and propagation of a life that will certainly be a failure. N.B. there is currently no way of guaranteeing the order in which two souls on the queue actually live. The queue can be and is shuffled when relieving divine boredom. HAPPY lives are not always happy Our mistake, perhaps, was the use of the word HAPPY, but in the times when it was adopted it was indeed happy compared with the expectations of those days. None the less, the World does try to keep the unhappy population within reasonable bounds, and does by and large succeed within our definition of "reasonable" (see INFO.GOD.SILLY.DEFINIT.IONS) Without actually reserving happiness, and thus wasting it, it is difficult to avoid the overcommitments to HAPPYness that are sometimes seen. The only mechanism the World has of holding off the load is to increase misery, and despite possessing precognition we can only do this in response to the arrival of more lives on the queue. Immediate and gross fluctuations of misery would be both unreasonable and unacceptable. Lack of a specially happy Saint queue This would not help significantly, the problem being a fundamental inability of mankind to meet our demands in these terms rather than any scheduling problem. There is particular contention for the use of blessings during the day, especially in times of trouble, and no saint's life is really happy by the time the saint has been condemned, martyred, and canonised. The Trinity hopes that the planned adoption of HADES, Satan's soul archive management system, will lessen the need for saints. Meanwhile users who find themselves needing to be blessed frequently during the day are encouraged to discuss with Angel Services whether they should have more virtues. XWorld has bugs/infelicities/deficiencies XWorld was primarily written for the benefit of the maintenance team, and is made available to mankind on a "Stop moaning!" basis only. Even outright tragedies are merely regarded as a matter for a divine "Noted", except in so far as they are a problem to the maintenance team.