SCIENCE MOMENT by E.C. McMullen Jr.
THE MATRIX SEQUELS, PREQUELS, AND REMAKES THE MATRIX - MASH THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS - 2021 !!!THE SCIENCE MOMENT!!!

ALL THE MATRIX
SCIENCE MOMENTS

THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS

A misstep in THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS is how it's made clear that in The Real, the machines operate on a binary system where the foundation of all computer "DNA" is 1s and 0s.

Since 1998 humans have been making and testing Quantum computers until finally, in 2021 we are on the razor edge of having them move into consumer models, which will take us away from binary computing forever. How sharp is that edge? 5 years from this writing you'll probably be reading this on your quantum handheld and the only reason it will be about 5 years is because (barring another pandemic - or possibly because of one), that's about how long it will take for marketing and consumer adoption.

In fact, binary computing was obsolete back when the first THE MATRIX came out in 1999.

Why?

In 1998 Oxford University physicists Jonathan Jones and Michel Mosca demonstrated the first physical Quantum computer. As of this writing that was 24 years ago.

So why do we still use binary?

This is why we have it in the first place and why it's obsolete.

Binary logic math (Base set 2) was invented over 300 years ago in 1701 when polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (co-creator of Calculus) submitted his essay, A New Science of Numbers (D'une Nouvelle Science Des Nombres) to the Paris Academy, it featured his new binary system of counting. Unlike Calculus or the decimal number system, binary math had no real practical applications so it was little more than a novelty. As far as we can tell, nobody bothered with it for the next 95 years and even that publication is obscure.

But seeds of thought can germinate.

In the mid to late 19th century, George Boole (Boolian Logic) was a brilliant self-taught mathematician who turned Algebra on its head (New math? Bah!) as he found heaven in the logic of numbers. Boolean Logic found a rational use for binary calculations.

In the 20th Century, electronic computers ran on either Analogue computations or Digital.

First real electronic digital computer, ENIAC was built for winning the war and went into action in 1945. It used 10 base (Decimal) instead of 2 base (Binary).

As ponderous and difficult the behemoth was to operate and program, in a race ENIAC could calculate in 30 seconds what would take a math wiz human 20 hours.

ENIAC's massive vacuum tubes had only two states: On or Off. With the invention of Transistors in the following decade, ENIAC, with its 100 foot long array of 18,000 tubes, and a weight of about 30 tons, was retired in 1954. Unlike ENIAC, Bell Laboratories new, faster, smaller transistors (centimeters instead of yards) went binary because that was faster, easier and the electronics were smaller: Hand held small! You could hold the calculating equivelent of five ENIACS in one hand!

Within two years of Sony building the first transistor radio TR-55 in 1955, they invented the diode in 1957: An actual semiconductor.

Two years after that, Texas Instruments patented the silicon semiconductor integrated chipset.

The ability to take mathmatical calculations that would take a team of experts a century to figure, could now take seconds. The speed exponentially doubled every two years.

Was there a ceiling to how fast, powerful, and small the chipset could get? Yes, and that ceiling was the outdated binary system.

It's not that a quantum digital computer runs faster than a binary digital computer, per se. It's that it runs with more calculating power and less energy. The foundation of a quantum computer is that it is far ahead of modern operating systems which have to boot up and load up because millions of pages of code are written in order for the modern computer to do the current heavy lifting. Those gigs of info are always actively running in the back ground.

A Quantum computer turns on as soon as you provide power: like flipping on a light switch. It doesn't boot or load anything because its functionality is ready to go right out of the chipset. Yes, it takes Megabits more room (eg built into the CPU architecture), but it needs Terabits less room (eg RAM and Drive) for operation.

It's like this: Because binary can only be a 1 or 0, off or on, it takes a lot of them to do major calculations above what a simpler calculator watch can do.

For example, here is the single word Binary, written in binary,
01000010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001

You can see how, beyond math calculations related to math (word processing, movies, music, and artistic digital design - every digital non-math thing you do - like my writing all of this, are all math calculations to a digital computer), binary can get real complicated and confusing real fast. Yet it's (relatively) easy to manufacture hardware for it.

So why aren't we using Quantum computers right now?

None of your software, none of your files, nothing you've saved in binary bits will run in Quantum qubits: not your videos, Twitter, email, or Non-Fungible Tokens. It will take years of data entry for humans to move all of our electronic info from binary to quantum AND have them accurately translated and opened by whatever software someone will make to do that. Untold hundreds of billons, maybe trillions will be spent by the world governments and corporations, starting with the ultra wealthy early adopters first and trickling down to the consumer market.

Nobody is going to spend all that money bringing something to market that no one will use.

Quantum computing is technically ready for the market, it's just that the market isn't ready for it.

Market dynamics and consumer adoption would never apply to THE MATRIX so the concept of it running on a binary system, built to run optimally on mid-20th century transistors, is facepalm short-sighted.

Worse, there was nothing in the story of RESURRECTIONS that needed to focus repeatedly on this point. The majority of people in the audience (students, mechanics, doctors, lawyers, laborers, service) don't have beyond a kindergarten level knowledge of binary computing, why we have it, and why it works.

If co-writer, Producer, and Director Lana Wachowski had made the workings of THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS,

"indistinguishable from magic",

that would have been fine with the audience.1

It's great if the science is beyond anything we know (like the mind machine in FORBIDDEN PLANET or time travel in THE TERMINATOR). It's when the science IS what so many of us already know: All of the millions of coders from hardware engineers to software engineers, high schoolers, college students, trade school engineers, and the multitude of various coding languages. That's a smaller but sizeable chunk of THE MATRIX audience: The hardcore audience. Those are the ones who watch, rewatch, and spend money on all the ancillary products from discs to games to clothes.

Earth computers cannot punch above their weight class (8 bit running on 16, 16 on 32, 32 on 64bit), they can't punch laterally either (analogue running on digital), nor can their base (the foundation of whatever computer language you are using) run on computers built above or below them. Binary, Trinary, Decimal won't talk to each other.

That's why printers still using 32 or 16 bit can't run on 64 bit without an emulator, written on 64 bit, that allows the 64 to "dumb down" to 32. Because the 32 bit can't rise up.

Which also makes Roland Emmerich's 1996, INDEPENDENCE DAY and the idea of 16 bit earth-bound computers hacking into staggeringly advanced non-binary alien computers even and ever more preposterous.

Page 1 ALL THE MATRIX SCIENCE MOMENTS

This article copyright 2022 E.C.McMullen Jr.

END

CHANGE YOUR SHIRT
Feo Amante's Horror Thriller T-Shirt by Feo Studios	Feo Amante's Horror Thriller T-Shirt by Feo Studios

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE THESE (Sub-Section: MACHINES CONTROL US)
COLOSSUS MOVIE REVIEW	THE TERMINAL MAN MOVIE REVIEW	WESTWORLD MOVIE REVIEW

Return to Movies