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When arcade play pays off

kittynh

Penultimate Amazing
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Dec 18, 2002
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I'm watching the tv show "Mysteries of the Deep" ( or something like that)

These guys go diving to find out what has happened to "lost ships" . They try to find the ships first off, and then figure out why they went down.

They usually send down one of those robot subs with just a camera first. And ofcourse, the robot just kicks up a lot of silt and you can't see anything.

But this dive the robot sub was doing great. It was manuvering in bitty spaces. And you could hear the "driver" (on the ship) saying stuff like, "I"m going for it man!"

Finally they show him. He has a little joy stick box with some other little buttons. He has his ball cap on backwards, and is looking at the screen with an intensity Ive only seen in mall arcades or with kids playing Xbox.

The guy is very young, and he's really good. The scientist and divers are all but appaulding this dude as he controls this robot sub.

They then mention that he had spent a large part of his life playing games i narcades.

I'll bet his mother told him he would NEVER get a decent job if he spent all of his time playing those darn games.

I looked him up online and he's considered one of the best, even though he is one of the youngest.

So shove a joystick in your childs hand!
 
More than one profession is moving this way. There was an article a few years back about how surgery and other medical procedures were becoming more and more like video games and how the training for those procedures resembled video games.

Fun fact: When I saw this article, I was working at a video game company.
 
the best part about this guy is he had not forgotten his roots, even on the ship. words like "dude" and "man, this is what I live for" came out of his mouth. He was dressed like a gamer in big pants and everything.

But his intensity while steering the robot, with currents, and manuvering!!

Plus he could not point the control jets where they would stir up the silt. He figured out why this one ship had been sunk, what the cargo was, everything! The scientists were going, "can you get it in there?" or "we need to see that...do you think you can do that?" He was just unblinking and saying, " no problem man...."

I loved it!
 
Reminds me of the scene in Jurassic Park, where Alex, the girl, saves the day by plonking herself in front of a computer, says "I know this, it's a UNIX", and is able to find the needle-in-a-haystack file in moments, navigating through a 3D "file system", a thoroughly idiotic idea.

You could hear groans from various parts of the theatre: That's where the computer people sat...
 
CFLarsen said:
Reminds me of the scene in Jurassic Park, where Alex, the girl, saves the day by plonking herself in front of a computer, says "I know this, it's a UNIX", and is able to find the needle-in-a-haystack file in moments, navigating through a 3D "file system", a thoroughly idiotic idea.

You could hear groans from various parts of the theatre: That's where the computer people sat...
Click to expand...

I remember that. Apparently what we saw in that movie was a real filesystem navigator called fsn by sgi. Since I can't post URLs, try Google searching for fsn sgi. It comes up first for me.
 
CFLarsen said:
Reminds me of the scene in Jurassic Park, where Alex, the girl, saves the day by plonking herself in front of a computer, says "I know this, it's a UNIX", and is able to find the needle-in-a-haystack file in moments, navigating through a 3D "file system", a thoroughly idiotic idea.

You could hear groans from various parts of the theatre: That's where the computer people sat...
Click to expand...

I love films where they do that. Especially ones like Hackers where they go zooming around skyscraper type things. I wish my computer did that when I go on the net. All I get is some silly skeptic forum. :p

Not to derail the thread or anything...
 
Cuddles said:
I love films where they do that. Especially ones like Hackers where they go zooming around skyscraper type things. I wish my computer did that when I go on the net. All I get is some silly skeptic forum. :p

Not to derail the thread or anything...
Click to expand...
Not to derail the thread a little more, but in Swordfish, Hugh Jackman plays a well-muscled and tan expert computer hacker who drinks wine while he works. That aside, whatever it is he is supposed to be doing has an interface that looks more like a child's logic game (a la, place the round object in the round hole) than anything.
 
Many Doctors of surgery are required to play an hour of Videogames before they perform. Tightens up the ol' hand/eye.
 
Upchurch said:
Not to derail the thread a little more, but in Swordfish, Hugh Jackman plays a well-muscled and tan expert computer hacker who drinks wine while he works. That aside, whatever it is he is supposed to be doing has an interface that looks more like a child's logic game (a la, place the round object in the round hole) than anything.
Click to expand...
And not to derail the thread yet more, he manages to crack a 128-bit encryption scheme in one minute while receiving - ahem - unwelcome attention from a busty, lippy bimbo. He later breaks 512-bit encryption in the same time frame, but without the distraction. I think that we are expected to believe that 512-bit encryption is four times as strong as 128-bit, rather than 2384 times.

Either that, or something about the marvels of modern technology somehow ...

'Luthon64
 
Anacoluthon64 said:
And not to derail the thread yet more, he manages to crack a 128-bit encryption scheme in one minute while receiving - ahem - unwelcome attention from a busty, lippy bimbo. He later breaks 512-bit encryption in the same time frame, but without the distraction. I think that we are expected to believe that 512-bit encryption is four times as strong as 128-bit, rather than 2384 times.

Either that, or something about the marvels of modern technology somehow ...

'Luthon64
Click to expand...

Well, admittedly, for some forms of 128-bit that time frame is believable (128 bit WEP, for example, will go in about 7 to 12 seconds...mainly because some bozo published the algorithm...). BUt yeah, pretty much unrealistic. OF course, I've never heard of encryption being broken by hand, on-the-fly either. It's typically the use of specialized code-breaking applications.

But that doesn't play well on a movie screen. Imagine an hour of the film being the main character getting a sandwich and watching a few TV sitcoms while he waits for the code-breaker program to finish :D
 
Upchurch said:
That aside, whatever it is he is supposed to be doing has an interface that looks more like a child's logic game (a la, place the round object in the round hole) than anything.
Click to expand...

Isn't that how computers work?
 
Huntsman said:
Well, admittedly, for some forms of 128-bit that time frame is believable (128 bit WEP, for example, will go in about 7 to 12 seconds...mainly because some bozo published the algorithm...). BUt yeah, pretty much unrealistic. OF course, I've never heard of encryption being broken by hand, on-the-fly either. It's typically the use of specialized code-breaking applications.
Click to expand...
Actually, the audience gets a brief glimpse of the protagonist writing what looks to be a piece of code in C, all from memory of course, and compiling and working flawlessly first time. But then he was the world's premier hacker at one time in the past...


Huntsman said:
But that doesn't play well on a movie screen. Imagine an hour of the film being the main character getting a sandwich and watching a few TV sitcoms while he waits for the code-breaker program to finish :D
Click to expand...
Indeed, but the situation is in reality much, much more dramatic. By way of illustration, the erstwhile de facto standard symmetric encryption algorithm was DES with a bit-strength of 56. Triple-DES (a.k.a. 3-DES) is the DES en- and decryption algorithms applied three times over with two separate keys, and has an effective bit-strength of 112. According to Bruce Schneier, the NSA has a dedicated piece of hardware codenamed "Deep Crack" for breaking DES encrypted messages in an expected time of 2½ days per message. For 3-DES encrypted messages, the expected time requirement for the same hardware is 3·256·2½ = 540,431,955,284,459,520 days, or about 100,000 times the present age of the universe (±15·109 years).

'Luthon64
 
Anacoluthon64 said:
Indeed, but the situation is in reality much, much more dramatic. By way of illustration, the erstwhile de facto standard symmetric encryption algorithm was DES with a bit-strength of 56. Triple-DES (a.k.a. 3-DES) is the DES en- and decryption algorithms applied three times over with two separate keys, and has an effective bit-strength of 112. According to Bruce Schneier, the NSA has a dedicated piece of hardware codenamed "Deep Crack" for breaking DES encrypted messages in an expected time of 2½ days per message. For 3-DES encrypted messages, the expected time requirement for the same hardware is 3·256·2½ = 540,431,955,284,459,520 days, or about 100,000 times the present age of the universe (±15·109 years).

'Luthon64
Click to expand...

Yeah, I was just setting the principle :p

Imagine realistic computer movies:

Non-techie: "Oh my God! They're hacking into the computer system that controls the nuclear missle launch codes! And we can't turn it off!"

Computer Tech: <reaches down, pulls network cables, gets another cup of coffee>


Non-techie: "Hurry, this virus is going to destroy our computer system!"

Computer Tech: <reaches down, pulls power plug, removes hard drive, restores from backup, gets another cup of coffee>


Might be good for a few scenes in a comedy.... :D
 
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