There are many reasons why you might decide to run a history update on your Q-Earth. If you’ve been running the sim for a while, a new set of system updates are likely available, improving efficiency and ironing out any historical bugs that have been reported by our researchers. Such bugs may include inaccuracies which have since been uncovered and corrected, like the recent adjustment in the recorded death date of Nelson Mandela. The date has previously been mistakenly recorded as 1983, rather than 2013.
Simple transcription errors like this prevent the smooth running of the sims, especially those calculating the quantum outcomes of the period in question, and exploring alternative histories. For your in-sim beings, those who had been paying attention during the erroneous time period may remember the problematic data, but our updates overwrite all non-being records. We envision that after a number of in-sim decades, social memory will reflect the true events as they have truly been ascertained, according to the most up to date thinking.
Those of you experimenting with over-clocking (in order to run multiple versions of history in parallel): we salute you! It is your efforts which help to fill in the blanks of history by comparing the quantum outcomes of your sims with our current real world, and thus help to feed data back into other users’ sims. You are the raw data that make system updates possible! Even small details like book titles, snack packet colours and food names are useful. Truth is in the detail!
A quick history system update is still essential your own machines, to make sure you’re using the most accurate datasets. Running a merge, or accepting a pull request, will keep you up to date with minimum downtime. Some of your in-sim beings may persist with pre-merge data, as being-memory updates are still considered experimental and open to faults. But as these sim-beings die then so will the erroneous memories. If nothing else, the arguments over alternative pasts makes for entertaining viewing!