The Gaming Den

it occured to me the other day that the characters in the matrix are really poor portrayals of the kind of computer literate , spends-all-day-in-front-of-a-computer hacker nerds that would actually be freed from the matrix...

anyone with even a passing familiarity of 4chan knows exactly what I'm talking about...

my only explanation so far is that the real nerds were so god damned annoying that one day, for each of them, while they were jacked into the matrix, it occured to their crewmates... "he's helpless... do it now!"

All the holes in that movie, and this is what you choose to bitch about?

How about how the machines are powered by people's body heat and bioelecticity, 'combined with a form of fusion.' That's like powering your car with a hamster wheel 'combined with a form of internal combustion engine.'

Hell, even if you need meat hooked up to your power grid for some reason...

angelfromanotherpin wrote: How about how the machines are powered by people's body heat and bioelecticity, 'combined with a form of fusion.' That's like powering your car with a hamster wheel 'combined with a form of internal combustion engine.'

Not to mention that the energy required to build and set up all those body heat conversion tanks would far outweigh the actual energy produced.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:All the holes in that movie, and this is what you choose to bitch about?

How about how the machines are powered by people's body heat and bioelecticity, 'combined with a form of fusion.' That's like powering your car with a hamster wheel 'combined with a form of internal combustion engine.'

Executives pandering to the lowest common denominator. The Wachowshi brothers actually know their shit, or at least enough that I don't really care. The original plan was that the Deus ex Machina would be running on a big neural net with human brain tissue used as basic material. Humanity was a convenient source of hardware, being self replicating and everything.

Execs reacted by saying "and the NASCAR dad on the street is meant to understand this?"

Heath Robinson wrote: Execs reacted by saying "and the NASCAR dad on the street is meant to understand this?"

And that just goes to show how dumb the executives are. After all, everyone understands that zombies need human brrraaaaiiiinnnssss.

Didn't the machines want the humans to rebel? After all, they built the city the humans used...

However, it's it also like the electric car that has solar panels... To power the climate control fan? Or the regenerative breaking? Or...

-Crissa

Heath Robinson wrote:The original plan was that the Deus ex Machina would be running on a big neural net with human brain tissue used as basic material. Humanity was a convenient source of hardware, being self replicating and everything.

I considered the possibility that the machines were using human brains as wetware, but they're not self-replicating anymore, they're cloned in the baby orchards. And if it was just the brains you needed, why would you support all the extra meat? You could just have brains floating in nutrient fluid, and then they can't escape and cause trouble.

Crissa wrote:Didn't the machines want the humans to rebel? After all, they built the city the humans used...

I don't consider the sequels to have any weight at all. They were written by different people than the first one, are based on crap philosophy, and make even less sense.

That's interesting, I think the first movie sucked even more than the sequels.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:That's interesting, I think the first movie sucked even more than the sequels.

Well, that's why it's called subjective. I have a friend who thinks The Phantom Menace is the best of the Star Wars movies.

Nevertheless, Rotten Tomatoes, which is about as good a gauge for public opinion as there is, rates the first one at 86%, the second at 76%, and the last one at 37%.

I actually rather liked the movies, especially the first one (I pretty much agree with the rotten tomatos ratings). Of course that's probably because I don't really require a lot of accuracy from movies, I just require they be entertaining.

I was really bitching about anything, hell, if I'm going to bitch about the movies, I'll bitch about the fucking christ imagery in the last one. It was just kinda a random observation.

The real matrix would be fucking filled with lolcat references, and the freed minds would be fucking rickrolling the machines....

angelfromanotherpin wrote:

Heath Robinson wrote:The original plan was that the Deus ex Machina would be running on a big neural net with human brain tissue used as basic material. Humanity was a convenient source of hardware, being self replicating and everything.

I considered the possibility that the machines were using human brains as wetware, but they're not self-replicating anymore, they're cloned in the baby orchards. And if it was just the brains you needed, why would you support all the extra meat? You could just have brains floating in nutrient fluid, and then they can't escape and cause trouble.

Two criticisms that have entirely separate answers.

Part 1 is "humans aren't self-replicating anymore". To which I respond, "but individual cells are". Manufacturing a human is really easy when you've got time and the minimum level of nutrition. Once you've fully worked out how to turn their brains into computers you no longer need to pay attention to the process of actually manufacturing your hardware beyond setting up the initial conditions. Evolution set the hardware to manufacture itself. From this perspective it's pretty elegant.

Is it actually stated that the baby orchards are cloning centres? The kind of equipment you need is pretty annoying to use and the costs associated kind of outweigh the benefits of using humans for processing elements in the short term. You still have the long term advantage that carbon and hydrogen are extremely common in the universe, allowing you to grow smarter than if you ran on metal and silicon. The Deus ex Machina was built to run on a massive collection of human brains. It's probably extremely nontrivial to port it onto some other kind of hardware.


Part 2 is "the extra meat is superfluous". I assume that bacteria still subsist somewhere, so leaving brains exposed to their environment is dangerous since they'll pick up horrible diseases. Equally, amputation is a lot of effort for the benefits it gives you - which is that you don't have to deal with processing element uprisings. Once you've left the skin on, you can't go for nutrient bath since you've got to maintain skin integrity, so you have to leave the torso in place (since it contains the vital organs).

It's more efficient just to do a lacklustre job of hunting down and killing escapees, and let the fear of being crushed like a bug keep those that escape from actually ever doing anything of significance. Less overall effort, since the number of escapees is small compared to the number of people the Deus ex Machina is running on. You'd have to do a bunch of amputation to keep the entire population of processing elements out of legs to stand on.

Rotten Tomatoes always rates white-male fantasy higher than other sorts, so merely having more female cast members means your RT rating goes down. Same for children and old people.

-Crissa

I'm just saying they actually pretty well represent my opinions of the movies, regardless of what they're based on.

Heath Robinson wrote:Part 2 is "the extra meat is superfluous".

But it is. A brain doesn't have to have extremities to function. And if keeping brains in a liquid is for some reason impossible (infection is seriously not a problem, you don't have to keep all the brains in a single jar), the creatures can be designed as not having inconvenient elements at all.

Any uprising would only be possible if the matrix was designed to have uprisings as part of its normal functioning (which may have been the main idea of the third movie, as I've gathered from random comments on the Internet - I've only read the script for the first one).

Crissa wrote:Rotten Tomatoes always rates white-male fantasy higher than other sorts, so merely having more female cast members means your RT rating goes down. Same for children and old people.

-Crissa

That's completely irrelevant. The second Matrix movie sucks because it is fucking terrible and has no redeeming features. I didn't even see the third movie because the second was so bad. Nothing happens. All fights accomplish nothing. Neo flies away from all confrontations and didn't even have to buy time or anything. He just does some worthless kung fu that doesn't even meaningfully impact him or the opposition.

All fights are meaningless. All exposition is worthless. All philosophizing is insulting to the intelligence of my pets. Either we have free will or things are predestined? Holy Shit really?

Miguel got me into that movie for free and I wanted my money back.

-Username17

Starmaker wrote:

Heath Robinson wrote:Part 2 is "the extra meat is superfluous".

But it is. A brain doesn't have to have extremities to function. And if keeping brains in a liquid is for some reason impossible (infection is seriously not a problem, you don't have to keep all the brains in a single jar), the creatures can be designed as not having inconvenient elements at all.

Any uprising would only be possible if the matrix was designed to have uprisings as part of its normal functioning (which may have been the main idea of the third movie, as I've gathered from random comments on the Internet - I've only read the script for the first one).

If, as has been stated in this thread, the second and third movies weren't written by the people who wrote the plotline for the original then I'm ignoring them. Which is good, because I've seen the first movie more than once, and I never really bothered with the second and third movies after seeing them the first time.


Infection is a problem. Infection doesn't care how many brains there are in a jar, just so long as it can get transmitted from brain A to brain B. Like, through the air. Or the water. Or even by being transferred between surfaces. At some point you've got to recycle your biological substances, and it's so much easier to do if you don't have to go through and sterilise everything.

Need I also point out that infection can have serious mind-fuckery effects. That is not going to be conducive to running an AI. It is unacceptable risk, because an AI needs to be able to trust its hardware. We need to be able to trust our hardware, that's why we evolved to protect it from all kinds of things. Losing the barriers between your brain and the outside world is pretty much a death sentence. Your brain is even isolated from the rest of your body by a second layer of protection. It is sensitive. I find it hard to believe that discarding the evolved defenses of the human body is ever going to be an optimum choice whilst bacteria, fungi, and viruses still roam.

The point you should be getting here is, by the way, that exposing your brain to the outside world is never going to be a good idea. Bacteria, viruses and other pathogens are never going to go away. Ever. A nutrient bath is, still, not sufficiently isolated from the rest of the world. You've got to get the brain in there in the first place, and that exposes it to the outside world and lets any kind of pathogen grow in a big tank full of nutrient. And you can't use anything that kills cells indiscriminately. We do, however, have a system that is discriminating about what kind of cells it kills. It comes with that "superfluous" meat and is coupled to the biology of the individual that it came from.


In the case of people waking from the system, I'm willing to believe that people have been devoting time and effort to jacking people out of the Matrix and they've found a reliable solution. No system can be perfect. I'm pretty sure that Goedel is relevent here. Like, some kinds of gaming will be incomputable to detect.

FrankTrollman wrote:
That's completely irrelevant. The second Matrix movie sucks because it is fucking terrible and has no redeeming features. I didn't even see the third movie because the second was so bad.

The third, while still pretty bad, wasn't as bad as the second.

The biggest problem I had with the second movie is it didn't follow from the first. Like, at all. Neo goes from being able to see the Matrix and rip it apart at the end of the first movie to merely very good at fighting and able to fly at the beginning of the second. WTF was that all about?

Heath Robinson wrote:If, as has been stated in this thread, the second and third movies weren't written by the people who wrote the plotline for the original then I'm ignoring them. Which is good, because I've seen the first movie more than once, and I never really bothered with the second and third movies after seeing them the first time.

The Matrix credits still list the Wachowski brothers as the authors for all three films, but in the mid-80s, a woman named Sophia Stewart submitted a copyrighted manuscript called 'The Third Eye' to the Wachowskis when they sent out a call for sci-fi work. When The Matrix came out, she noticed that it was her manuscript with the serial numbers filed off. And found a number of witnesses who had seen her manuscript being passed around the Matrix set while shooting was going on. So she sued them that year, and eventually won in 2004.

edit: Whoops, my bad. While she won a part of the case in 2004, the case continued and was dismissed in 2005. I'm not sure what the circumstances were, so she may or may not have been a crank. Nevertheless, the significant disconnects between the original movie and the two sequels convinces me that either they had different authors, or the authors suffered a significant psychological breakdown beween them.