Most of our sci-fi movies and shows use an imaginary world to explore aspects of our present reality like Star Trek (1996, TV), or just as an exciting fantasy, like Star Wars (1977). In print this kind of story is soft sci-fi. Hard sci-fi looks at what could happen in a realistic future after new scientific discoveries, like 2001 (1968). Travelling Salesman is a hard sci-fi story that adds one new discovery to our world and imagines the consequences for the discoverers.
In the movie, four mathematicians confront the US government official who has just overseen their successful breakthrough in math that will enable code breaking of every communication code. The four hope that their work will be made public in order to be applied to many important problems, but the spook makes it clear that their work is top secret and there's to be no negotiation.
One of the four, Dr. Horton, has found a further extension of the work which would allow automated reasoning with virtually no limit, something akin to strong AI. He hasn't included this in the published work perhaps out of fear that the applications would be too dangerous. Horton demands that the work be made public. His fellow nerds don't back him.
Then after an hour of very stimulating thrust and parry, we get a really unfortunate twist ending. You can stop the DVD at 1:10 with 10 minutes left and get a better movie. The spook tells Horton that his whole family will die if he reveals the work. So Horton goes home and reads over the letter from the President. The watermark is an Illuminati pyramid! Realizing... something... he runs a super-virus program that apparently breaks all the computers in the world. The end.
I rate the first hour a 10/10 for those like me who love hard science fiction stories and treasure those few that come along as films. Many audiences won't like it at all. It's not rigorous as far as all the math and terminology (I noticed "SCI classified" and "PSPACE" are not used properly) and a few people who might otherwise be fans will hate that. I studied the real math that the story refers to and that probably helped with my interest in its implications. Viewers should be aware that the film's premise is true, that our current codes could in principle be broken by a scientific breakthrough. The script is all about the ideas and has little interest in characters. It's almost a one-act play as far as staging goes. The final twist is a cheap way to wrap things up.
In 2013 we've learned from Edward Snowden that the US NSA has done much more to crack codes worldwide in the past decade than we had known. The NSA has a history of hiring about half of US mathematicians. If they thought there was a chance of making a breakthrough like the one in the film, they would indeed keep it a secret. We now know that in the 70s the NSA discovered differential cryptography, an attack on the DES crypto system that was not rediscovered in the open literature for 20 years. In short the breakthrough and cover-up in the film is plausible politically and perhaps mathematically.
Those who enjoyed Travelling Salesman should check out Primer (2004). It is a low budget time travel movie with a similar talk-heavy hard sci-fi orientation.
Check the Dr Strangelove homage at 13:20!
In the movie, four mathematicians confront the US government official who has just overseen their successful breakthrough in math that will enable code breaking of every communication code. The four hope that their work will be made public in order to be applied to many important problems, but the spook makes it clear that their work is top secret and there's to be no negotiation.
One of the four, Dr. Horton, has found a further extension of the work which would allow automated reasoning with virtually no limit, something akin to strong AI. He hasn't included this in the published work perhaps out of fear that the applications would be too dangerous. Horton demands that the work be made public. His fellow nerds don't back him.
Then after an hour of very stimulating thrust and parry, we get a really unfortunate twist ending. You can stop the DVD at 1:10 with 10 minutes left and get a better movie. The spook tells Horton that his whole family will die if he reveals the work. So Horton goes home and reads over the letter from the President. The watermark is an Illuminati pyramid! Realizing... something... he runs a super-virus program that apparently breaks all the computers in the world. The end.
I rate the first hour a 10/10 for those like me who love hard science fiction stories and treasure those few that come along as films. Many audiences won't like it at all. It's not rigorous as far as all the math and terminology (I noticed "SCI classified" and "PSPACE" are not used properly) and a few people who might otherwise be fans will hate that. I studied the real math that the story refers to and that probably helped with my interest in its implications. Viewers should be aware that the film's premise is true, that our current codes could in principle be broken by a scientific breakthrough. The script is all about the ideas and has little interest in characters. It's almost a one-act play as far as staging goes. The final twist is a cheap way to wrap things up.
In 2013 we've learned from Edward Snowden that the US NSA has done much more to crack codes worldwide in the past decade than we had known. The NSA has a history of hiring about half of US mathematicians. If they thought there was a chance of making a breakthrough like the one in the film, they would indeed keep it a secret. We now know that in the 70s the NSA discovered differential cryptography, an attack on the DES crypto system that was not rediscovered in the open literature for 20 years. In short the breakthrough and cover-up in the film is plausible politically and perhaps mathematically.
Those who enjoyed Travelling Salesman should check out Primer (2004). It is a low budget time travel movie with a similar talk-heavy hard sci-fi orientation.
Check the Dr Strangelove homage at 13:20!