Well, he is a math wizard*, so I could see him figuring out a few clever shortcuts. But there's only so much you can do. It could offload rarely-updated parts of history off to the hard drive, so long histories would work in theory, but they'd be even slower than they are now.
*Arithmancer, technically.
Actually, there is a lot you can do, but it's all a matter of how much data you are willing to sacrifice, and how clever you can be.
Compare a .bmp to a .jpg to a .png.
All of these are image formats, and bitmaps just the raw data represented exactly and faithfully. Jpgs, meanwhile, are willing to lose a decent amount of data in exchange for cutting the amount of actual data that needs to be stored before you can extrapolate out the data you want. You lose some resolution, but you can get much more image in the same amount of space. A png, however, is even more clever, and manages to be lossless with its data at the same time that it expands on the functionality of the original format.
PNGs only came about because many people spent a very long time thinking about how to refine the art of storing art, however.
If I were to give you a word problem to solve where I told you a train was traveling a 240 mile journey at 60 miles per hour, you would simply divide 240 by 60 and get the answer. If a typical game is told to do the same thing, however, it would start a minute-by-minute pushing of a train object along the grid until it hit its destination, and return the value of how many iterations it had to push.
It's a matter of how you look at the math problem from the first place.
The trick is to find ways to properly abstract your math problems into a higher level of math that the computer can still run.
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Topic: Has anyone succesfully generated a very long history? (Read 57338 times)