@AlexP, statistically speaking, outside of roman times there were more latin ignorants than latin speakers

@L.Dutch: That's the reason for the qualifications "everybody who was somebody" and "directly or through an interpreter". Yes, I know that around 1800 most French people did not know French, let alone Latin.

This reminds me of the game geoguesser, which takes to you to a google streetview at a random location on Earth: geoguessr.com It is surprising how quick you can narrow down your rough location just by the type of plants, mountains, road markings, etc.. However, it's really hard if you get dropped on some forest road in the middle of, say, Iowa. I imagine for your question it would be easy if you land in a city, but very hard if you find yourself somewhere in Northern Scotland, miles away from anyone.

@gerrit if you know you're in Iowa, then yes it would be easy. As for Scotland, it would be easy to figure out you're in Scotland, but when in Scotland...

Do I have to answer immediately after I get back? Or can I gather evidence, take notes, then do some research after getting back to the present, in order to use the evidence I gathered to determine the time I visited?

Find a pub, pretend to be drunk, ask for the date. If there is no pub or bar or tarvern, you don't wan't to be there!

Is there a printing press? That will help.

@Drag and Drop you might get a date with a barmaid, but that date might not be what you are looking for :)

If you have the time to google up a reference chart dendrochronology might work. The climate varies from one exact region to another, so it is not certain to work without more accurate location data. But, five minutes in a forest would be enough to drill a hole to a nearby tree and take a sample. May be this takes more preparations than the wizard is willing to grant you?

Nice concept! If the last limitation could be lifted (need to answer immediately), the game could be really interesting: I am not a historian so looking at a church will not help much but if I could gather some information and be able to check it when back I would have a great time (easy to get the general time, but much more difficult to pinpoint the exact day)

How are the people in this simulation expected to act? ...in that, the "normal" historical response to a bizarre looking person gibbering incomprehensibly in Western Europe probably involves the villagers busting out their torches and pitchforks and trying to kill the witch/exorcise the demon (or maybe "free slave"/drive off the interloper, going further back in time). Obviously, depending on the expected response to interacting with the locals, different strategies would be advisable.

Is there an upper limit on how much you will go to the past? For example, could the pointy hat guy send you 2000 years in the past? 10000? One million?

Can you give us a distribution as to what time you end up at? The best ways to handle this are very different if you visit the 13th century, or 5000BCE, or 10000BCE.

@DragandDrop People in the past (and other countries) speak different languages. Asking for current date isn't as easy as you might think, understanding the answer even less so (e.g. even if you understand every word they say, they might say something like "The third year of our good king Edward").

Thinking outside the box, how do you feel about hacking the simulation? I mean, the answer must be right there in the code, innit?

@Swier - Don't worry, we timestamp the haggis for just this reason.

"We have no time to prepare ourself:" The problem is unless your a specialist, in a given area, you will not have time to memorize architecture styles or anything else. Once you pre-date the newspaper and cemetaries its going to get a lot harder. An astronomer would have all the formulas memorized and probably given you an exact date. Make a sun dial, and they can even give you a time of day. We need to know our avatars skill set so we can have baseline knowledge.