The Butterfly effect. This one would go straight to the top of my favorite movie list. Ten minutes into the movie and I thought I had a new post in hand. This movie not only added fuel to my imagination but also connected some of the missing links in it.
Being a programmer myself, I could see the whole story as a series of if-else statements each condition leading to results miles apart. I guess everyone who have watched this one, would take a few minutes to reminisce the various paths they have trodden over their lifetime, take time to think "What if it was the other way ...?" and like the great Robert Frost would say to themselves "And that has made all the difference". Seems reasonable.
The only difference between reality and the movie, seen by my programmer's mind, would be the missing 'while(!satisfied)' loop, wrapping all the if-elses, which is absent in the real world. If only that was there, I am not sure we would love our lives as much as we do now, if at all we do. After all, even the hero was content with the original state of events.
Coming to programming and an other favorite movie of mine, the Matrix, I imagine Programming the Matrix would be lot easy with this idea of the butterfly effect. If all such effects are carefully taken care of and every path thus emerging made to end in one final situation, which is the desired state of the Matrix, the Architect would not have needed to make six versions of the same thing. Guess that's what makes programming difficult. Every other day you find a case you have not dealt in your code and that one becomes "The One" resulting in the fall of the existing version and a need to write a new one arises.
One more concept which made the movie more interesting was that of Probability. The force which drives and connects the events together. A lot of events might have happened. Instead, just one of them happened, the destined one. And what made that event a destined one? Yes. Probability. This again reminds me of one of the good books I have read "God's Debris" which states that God is part probability. Now if God was the creator, He is the one who controls events on this earth, then with all probability, He must be Probability or the one who defines and manages it. Perfect.
Incomplete, convoluted and uncertain ...
2 comments:
How nice it would be if a person could program his own life, making use of his best programming skills.
But Life is God's program,No patent rights for us ! So we fulfill our creativity by making these movies!
If a person was allowed to program his own life and given a 'single' chance to execute it, most of us would die without even being born owing to the innumerous compilation errors we get before the first execution ;).
And if given multiple chances, the fun part is gone.
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