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Date Posted: 00:32:46 06/11/03 Wed
Author: Ender
Subject: My messages are TOO long, hehe
In reply to: neonate 's message, "ok." on 23:27:01 06/08/03 Sun

I understand your point (I think), but I don't really agree with the way you portray it. The whole "there is no past or future in the matrix" line seems a little misleading. There IS, in a sense, a past and a future, as well as there is a beginning and ending to any movie, and to understand any part of it fully you must see it in sequence from beginning to end. I happen to be a computer sciecetest (as you can probably tell from my spelling inconsistencies), and I think your view of a program is a little distorted. When a program is written, it IS, for the most part, linear. It has a beginning, which in C++ would be the main{} function, and then it progresses through its code in linear fashion calling upon functions or excercising loops when necessary. But a program CANNOT jump back through itself. You can simulate such an event by recalling the function like in a recursive call, but you can not litterally say to the computer that you want it to jump back four lines and do the same thing all over again. I wish you could, but you can't.

So the point that I think I would rather make, besides saying that there is no past or future in the present, is rather that there is a past and there is a future but it is a set future that has already been coded. Neo can see this hard code, I suppose, and that is why he is able to see the future. But even this position rubs me a little the wrong way, for the majority of programs require user input, and I'm sure the matrix falls under this category. Take, for instance, a video game. In super mario brothers, it IS hardcoded that the last boss you face is bowser, so I could say that I can predict the future to an extent, because I can say that a person who posseses enough ablility will eventually meet bowser, but it is NOT hardcoded that he will beat him. It's not like as soon as he walks onto bowser's bridge, the computer takes over and graps the axe with little effort. This triumph depends on the users ability to time his run, or perhaps his ability to stay big throughout the previous level. The only way, therefore, for me to know for sure if someone will be able to beat bowser is if I can foresee such ability, or if I can predict exactly how such player will respond to the challenge. That is where I run a little unclear in the movie. How do they account for such things? My guess is that they don't. At the end of the movie, you hear the architect speak of the trouble of choice. Now while a computer program designed to study human choice could probably get fairly close to perfection, being able to predict the behavior of human response in almost any situation, maybe it would not always be correct, much like the matrix is not always able to "posses" someone's mind.

I don't know though. I'll have to wait to see the next movie. But back to the original point, there IS a past and a future in the matrix, but it is merely programmed to respond in a definite way. THAT, I believe, is how the future is predicted in the matrix.

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