"You already said that the opponent does not have true omnipotence. He is more a very skilled strategist, that can effectively pause the world, calculate all strategies, and choose accordingly. This is still a faulted actor, and can be cornered. I still think we should break the controls, but not the world. If he cant pause the game to evaluate his choices, he will make less perfect ones. The threat of world annihilation is a powerful tool to force this actor into a corner, but requires the actual will to do so... Yes trashcan, I know you have the will to push the button. Gleefully, and with wild abandon. The rest of us, however-- do not. Personally though, I think the best way to crash the world is far more simple."
Wierd walked over to the row of preserved consoles on the ops table, and flicked a few keys.
"This world is a simulation. That means it has to employ rules. What happens if I tell this computer to divide 10 by zero?" A serene smile crossed his face. "Either our omnipotent overlord has crafted some very good error trapping routines into the world, which could be used to OUR advantage if we then exploit them, or this one line of processing will crash the whole house of cards."
He looked overhead.
"Your move asshole." he said smoothly and joyfully, as he pressed the button.
DIVISION BY ZERO ERROR: PROCESS HALTED flashed on the terminal window, mere miliseconds before closing.
"Ahh, so you DID implement some error trapping--- Well, what about if somebody
smashes the stack then?"
[note, I intend to exploit the planespacked phenomenon on an unmooded dwarf who has been subjected to hypnosis to smash the stack, and inject new directives. The hypnotic suggestion will contain the data to be injected, as well as directives to the dwarf to implement it in a specific "slot" on the artifact. The sheer number of adornments on the artifact is what smashes the stack. All versions of DF are compiled for X86 processors, even the mac version. This means they all use the same stack structure, because that is CPU jump instruction dependent. It also means that assembly code to jam the keyboard device is universal. Modern macs are PCs with a special bios, and the hardware controllers in them are functionally identical. What the smashed stack does is steal execution away from the main loop by preventing the routine (in this case, the mooding dwarf routine) from returning properly, and using it to skip execution to data stored inside the structure. On windows, this could be arrested with DEP, but it is NOT turned on by default, and requires a reboot to turn on. The routine unpauses the game from the "artifact created!" window, then blocks all further keyboard interaction.)]