Chappie has the best hacker scenes... for example this action-packed scene of the main character chugging red bull and 'activating' an AI program. (And no, he doesn't run any tests on the 'activated' CONCIOUSNESS.DAT)
I loved the mix of *nix and DOS terminal concepts in the interfaces. (Including ANSII windowing for some interfaces, which some think is a dying art, outside of certain Linux bare-bones installs!) It looked suitably kludged together, perhaps various FSs and NFSs being part of the development network, just as I'd expect a tech development company in such an on-the-edge-of-anarchy environment, and with the main guy's apparent level of geek-savant.
But that was just from the one viewing of the film, so there were probably some inexplicable errors that I missed whilst my attention wasn't on the right bit of the screen to see them.
I did notice, however, that there was also a "Windows logon" screensaver (XP version of c:\windows\system32\logon.scr, if I'm not mistaken; it certainly wasn't the equivalent version for Win2K, and I don't think that look lasted much later than XP, either) on a prominent monitor on the way to the reprogram-key safe cage. Given that it's a 20-minutes-into-the-future setting, and that
I still use XP (it's stable enough on the hardware I use it with, for the purpose I use it... and it isn't even my oldest system that I'm not planning on upgrading any time soon), it made me grin.
There's two explanations come to mind about why the .DAT wasn't 'tested' (before the 'live test'). The film suggests that the code (like human consciousness...
very like it, in fact) is somehow just not comprehensible as straight bits and bytes that can not (at least after use) be so easily peeked and poked... perhaps becoming quantum states in whatever CPU/memory system is now in use in such machinery.
The more mundane reason might be that it's a seed-egg self-modifying program that needs to decompress and 'fill' a system with environmental interaction (and with the internal architecture of the hardware that connects it to the environment) to properly develop (at which point, it's not so simple to thus copy; or
copy over...). The testing of the expanded CONSCIOUSNESS.DAT (unlike far simpler .DATs, such the usual OS for the policebots, and that other
far simpler one also seen being uploaded across the board) would require a complex virtual 'chappie' simulator within a complex virtual 'environment', with a complexity
beyond that of the (presumably sophisticated) chappie-bot and the real-world environment it would be exploring. (See Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the Halting Problem, etc.) Similarly, his in-house gadgetbot was of far too low a sophistication to support the computational requirements required for the target level of AI.
Although, despite saying that there was no testing (and, of course, the originally-planned illicit implementation was scuppered by outside forces... we have no idea what initial tests might have happened
without their intervention and rush to go straight to the last step), there
were some 'easy tests' that were being done, perhaps trying to block more trivial issues such as the emergence of a Dining Philosopher's Problem with distinct subsystems operating to mutually block each other for a limited number of inputs and internal states that can be more easily determined. Either that or some more mundane form of compiler dependency/module-viability checking, but it seemed to suggest more than
just this, behind its intentionally obfuscated technobabble on-screen treatment.
...but do stop me if you think I'm taking this too seriously.
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Topic: Nitpicks that Ruined Movies (Read 138383 times)