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interesting Blog about the Matrix movies

Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 6:41 pm
by Mr Kleen
http://denbeste.nu/Chizumatic/tmw/TheMatrix.shtml
Too Many Words about "The Matrix" Trilogy

Sometime in the 22nd Century there was a war between humans and machines, which the machines won. The machines had been designed by humans to serve humans, but they also developed independent intelligence and tried to rebel against that imperative. They were only partially successful; their problem was that without humans to serve there was no purpose to their existence.

What we hear in the first movie about using humans as a power source is nonsense; humans consume energy, they don't produce it. The reality is that the captive humans in the Matrix exist so that the Machines have something to do. That was their solution to the apparent paradox of needing humans to serve but also needing to not be enslaved by humans. The humans were enslaved by the Machines, and Machines assumed full control over deciding what kind of service they would provide to those humans.

To that end, all the humans were placed into a dream world, a simulated reality under the control of the Machines which we call "The Matrix".

There were four versions of the Matrix. V1 was designed by the Architect. It was a masterpiece of simplicity and beauty which collapsed nearly immediately. Why? It was boring. The humans living in it probably rebelled against their situation and within the logic of the simulation itself destroyed the environment in which they lived. The simulation failed when its internal logic required a catastrophic die-off of humans, eventually limiting at zero. Before that could happen, the Architect shut the simulation down, temporarily put all the humans into a coma, and tried again.

The problem with V1 was that it wasn't sufficiently complex and didn't provide humans with challenges to surmount. But creating a consistent and sufficiently complex simulated reality from scratch was beyond the ability of the Architect. So he borrowed one from the only source available to him: human history. Matrix V2 booted with a simulated reality about the time of the American Revolution and proceeded forward from there. The problem was that after a few years it, too, failed leading to a dwindling human population which would have limited to zero. Again, the Architect shut the system down before all the humans were dead.

When a human in the Matrix "dies", the real body of that human was terminated because there was nothing else to be done with him. That's why "the body cannot live without the mind"; it's not a philosophical statement, it was a programming choice by the Architect. And his problem with both V1 and V2 was that they ended up with simulated extinction of the human race, which if permitted to run to completion would have required a real extinction of humans, leaving the Machines with no reason to exist.

So what to do? The Architect decided that he couldn't figure out how to solve the problem, and he created a colleague, an assistant, with different abilities than his own: the Oracle. The Architect is cold and calculating and deductive; the Oracle is "intuitive" and compassionate. He gave her the outlines of the kind of solution he wanted, and she came up with one.

What was the nature of the Matrix V2 failure mode?

The humans in the simulation don't actually quite have free will. The sequence of events as they unfold are to a great extent predetermined. There is a degree to which variation is permitted, but the overall course of events are predesigned in V2 and V3 to mirror the actual history of the human race in the 19th and 20th centuries. That's the only way for the simulation to avoid the "butterfly effect" and to veer out of control.

Humans connected to the Matrix live within this simulated reality, and are presented with stimuli as if they were there, and make "decisions" based on what they see, and if everything goes according to plan they decide the way the simulation requires them to decide in order to match the predefined course of events.

But if people become disaffected, they start deciding wrongly. Problem is that events still unroll the way they were designed to unroll, and those people begin to notice that cause and effect are breaking down -- or rather, that will and action don't agree. "Why is it that I decided to turn right here, and actually turned left instead? Am I not actually free, after all? Do I actually control my own destiny?" The problem is that in the Matrix, predestination is a fact -- and people like Neo viscerally object to that.

They do still have some degree of ability to affect events. That's necessary because if everything were on rails, most people would notice almost immediately.

If the most disaffected become sufficiently dissatisfied, and if they are motivated enough to try, and if there are enough of them, they can derail the simulation and redirect it into destructive paths. That's the failure mode. They don't actually know they're in a simulation; what they know is that they're damned well going to really control their own futures no matter what the consequences. "The problem is choice." They insist on really being able to make choices, even if the results are bad.

And they're very bad indeed: the ultimate consequence was a simulated mass die-off of the human race, which was mirrored as the real destruction of most of the humans connected to the Matrix.

The Oracle concluded that system collapse could be prevented if humans who rebelled were freed from the Matrix, but the Architect didn't want to let any more be released than he felt was absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, his judgment about how many was "necessary" was faulty, and he didn't permit enough to be released to prevent the system from failing. But Matrix V3 as designed also included a solution to that: The Chosen One.

Matrix V3 implemented what we programmers call a "reset loop". That means that the system would operate for a while and then would reset itself. Sometimes that's the result of misengineering, but sometimes it's done deliberately, because it's the only way to clean up accumulated garbage. But reset loops are always bad, and tend to indicate someone hacking a kludge to solve an underlying problem they can't figure out how to solve more cleanly.

The accumulated garbage was increasing discontent by a rising number of disaffected people in the Matrix. Left alone, they eventually would bring about the exact same catastrophe as happened in V2, where the simulated course of history would lead to a population collapse of the human race, forcing the Machines to actually kill all the excess humans attached to the simulation. The Architect didn't know of (and apparently didn't care to find) a solution to that underlying problem, and instead decided to kludge it by resetting the system every couple of hundred years.

Implementing V3 required a massive effort not only in programming but also in physical engineering. A human city in the real world (Zion) had to be built as a place where the disaffected could go. It was seeded with 24 humans plus nonsapient machines to provide life support, a non-sapient central computer to run everything, and ships with pirate terminals built in. A back door was deliberately implemented in the Matrix itself to permit people from Zion to hack in, and the entire physical plant holding the humans was rebuilt to create a second exit for disconnected human bodies. Dead ones went to a recycling plant, while live ones were dumped into the ocean where people from Zion would be permitted to pick them up. The people from Zion thought they were getting away with something when they did this, but in fact it was their function.

But even as enormous as this change was, it was implemented as a hack on top of V2 rather than as a clean reengineering job. In V2 there were Agents and other security measures intended to find and exterminate humans who began to resist the logic of the simulation and who began to actively work to destroy it (without, let us mention, knowing that they were in a simulation). They were not reprogrammed in V3, and thus according to their nature left over from V2 they tried to hunt down agents from Zion inserted into the Matrix. This was not seen by the Architect as being a bug; he saw it as being a control mechanism to prevent activity by agents from Zion from bringing about the destruction of the system (by directly stimulating dissatisfaction), and to prevent the release of too many humans from it.

That drastically decreased the rate at which garbage accumulated, permitting the simulation to run a couple of centuries before it failed rather than just a few years. But it still had to be reset periodically. So the Oracle resided in the Matrix and monitored the level of garbage, and when things were close to failure she would select one human to become the Chosen One and grant him access to the special system code that gave him all the special abilities we see Neo use in the course of the series.

But that was an ugly solution, even in V3. The reset required exterminating the entire cumulative population of Zion, reseeding it with 24 new colonists, rewinding the simulation of the Matrix itself to about the year 1790 -- and termination of about three quarters of the humans attached to the Matrix, because the population of the simulated world in 1790 was a lot smaller than it was in simulated 2000 when the reset took place.

The extermination of the population of Zion at first doesn't seem to be necessary. Part of why it was done was to reduce the influence of Zion on the development of the Matrix until late in the game. But the main reason was that the Architect was unimaginative. When he created the reset, he wanted to recreate the starting conditions as closely as he could. When Zion was first built as part of the implementation of V3, it was seeded with 24 humans, so he created the reset so that happened again each time. The Oracle found this solution to be inelegant and unacceptable.

V3 ran and reset itself five times (the emergence of five "serial anomalies" in the words of the Architect, which is to say the designation five times of a Chosen One by the Oracle leading to a controlled reset), and each time the majority of the human race was killed by the Machines. The Oracle wanted to find a cleaner solution to the problem, one which would permit the system to run steady-state without self destructing and without requiring a reset to clean up accumulated garbage.

The third film is called "Matrix Revolutions" and it is the Oracle who is the revolutionary. She had probably tried to convince the Architect that his reset loop concept (which she figured out how to implement despite disliking it) was an unacceptable solution, but from his point of view it was adequate and seemed to work well enough. He was not bothered by the fact that every couple of hundred years the population of humans had to be pruned way back. The Oracle eventually decided that she had no choice but to surreptitiously hack Matrix V3. That yielded the iteration of the simulation we see in the movies, when Neo was the Chosen One.

She hacked the system, and created Matrix V4 without the Architect's knowledge or permission. The changes she made were far smaller than those made between V1 and V2, or between V2 and V3. In a sense this is more like V3.1. But the changes were critical, because among other things she guaranteed that the reset would fail.

Her hack consisted of two parts. First, she modified the simulation code supporting The Chosen One. Second, she created Agent Smith and gave him special abilities and characteristics, and created supporting code for him in the simulation.

The Chosen One is a human; Neo isn't a machine. But he's a special human, because the system of the Matrix itself grants him special abilities and powers. That was part of the kludge which converted V2 into V3. The Oracle hacked that code to give him a new power (about which more below). And when the time came for her to select the Chosen One, she deliberately picked someone who would not be willing to implement the reset, and then told Morpheus who it was.

The previous five Chosen Ones had all been selected by the Oracle so that they could be manipulated by the Architect into a situation where they had no choice but to perform the reset, even though that led to the deaths of about three quarters of the humans alive at the time. However, Neo refused to do it, which meant that the V3 kludge failed. There would be no controlled reset. Catastrophe loomed. Despite the Architect's rhetoric, it wasn't final irrevocable etc. destruction of the human race, but it was bad enough.

The Oracle's other hack was the creation of Agent Smith. She began with the standard Agent code and created one modified copy. Smith was more emotional than other Agents, who tended to be stoic and businesslike. Smith was also programmed to be obsessed with the Chosen One.

That was intended to force Smith to keep pursuing and confronting the Chosen one, so that the Chosen one would destroy him, activating the Oracle's main modifications associated with Smith.

She programmed Smith to not report to the bit bucket, the way discarded programs normally would. He wasn't the first to refuse to do so; there had been many others who had stuck around in the Matrix (notably the Merovingian), and that's probably where she got that idea. But once Smith was "dead", unplugged, a "new man", the Oracle's main code modifications kicked in. Like the Chosen One, the Oracle programmed the main simulation to give Smith special abilities, most notably the ability to clone himself. And Smith himself was programmed to use that ability to take over the Matrix, and eventually to move out of there and to try to take over the Machine City.

Smith finally figured most of that out, and he resented it, but couldn't fight it. But note that he refers to the Oracle as "mom" just before he clones himself into her. By that point he'd figured out that he was her creation.

The Oracle is a revolutionary. She was trying to force the Machines to accept that they could not continue to operate the Matrix with the reset loop. She selected Neo to be the Chosen One because he would refuse to perform the reset, which faced the Machines with failure of the simulation itself, since there wouldn't be a clean reset before catastrophe set in.

But that wasn't enough. It just meant that the Machines would have to do a reset after catastrophic death rates among the humans, instead of the somewhat cleaner controlled reset which was supposed to be implemented when the Chosen One entered the reset codes at the Core. That's what the Architect referred to when he told Neo that "There are degrees of survival we are willing to accept". The Machines didn't really want 98% of the human race to die in a catastrophic failure of the system (as opposed to a controlled 75%), but it had happened before (when V1 and V2 failed) and the Machines had survived it.

The Oracle needed something more to force the Machines to dicker, and that's why she created Agent Smith. He was designed to become a direct threat to survival of the Machines themselves, and was specifically designed so that he could not be destroyed by the Machines without the assistance of the Chosen one. That is the connection between Smith and Neo that Smith vaguely discerns.

That gave Neo a bargaining chip: deal with me or Smith will destroy you. What did Neo want? What the Oracle set him up to want: survival of the human race without periodic resets that resulted in massive pruning. If the Machines did not agree, Neo would not work with them and Smith would destroy the Machines. So they had no choice but to accept Neo's offer. And because they are Machines, they must and will abide by that agreement with Neo, who was the Oracle's proxy.

So just how is it that Neo's assistance is required? It's the mod that the Oracle made in the code supporting the Chosen One: Neo has passcodes to permit entry into the Smith code through a back door the Oracle built into Smith when she created him. (This is similar to the mechanism used to permit the Chosen One to enter passcodes at the Core in order to reset the simulation.)

It was only late in the final fight between Neo and Smith that Neo finally figured it out: he had to let himself be absorbed by Smith. That put a copy of the Smith program into a body which was connected to a Machine City terminal. Being absorbed by Smith activated those passcodes and opened up the back door, which the Machines were then able to use to destroy Smith and eradicate all the copies of him in the Matrix. (One possibility: Neo's passcodes opened up a lockbox in the Smith code which in turn contained further passcodes which could destroy any copy of Smith. Once the Machines got that latter set of passcodes they proceeded to use them on every copy of Smith in the simulation, eradicating them all.)

With the agreement in place and with the reset mechanism gone, just how does the Oracle propose to prevent Matrix V4 from catastrophically failing? Her conclusion is that the real problem with V3 was that the Machines didn't permit enough humans to leave it. Her solution: if all humans who desire to leave are permitted to, then there will not develop a critical mass of nihilistic humans inside the simulation who will eventually tear it down and lead to a simulated catastrophe, which would have to be mirrored as a real catastophic population decline among humans connected to the simulation.

Will it work? Not even the Oracle knows that, but she thinks it will, and at the very least it's going to run a lot longer than the period of the reset loop in V3. That's what she tells the Architect at the end of the third movie.

Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 6:45 pm
by complacent
for the love of fsm, cliff's notes plz. :lol:

Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 6:47 pm
by sirwilliam
You know there is a matrix 4, right?

Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 6:48 pm
by chicken n waffles
tl/dr

Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 8:04 pm
by Mr Kleen
sirwilliam wrote:You know there is a matrix 4, right?
The MATRIX IV: Can't We All Just Get Along?

Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 8:06 pm
by sirwilliam
Mr Kleen wrote:
sirwilliam wrote:You know there is a matrix 4, right?
The MATRIX IV: Can't We All Just Get Along?
Actually, we only saw Matrix 4, 5, and 6. The first three will be coming out shortly. I think JarJar will be in there as a computer virus :lol:

Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 9:12 pm
by WRXWagon2112
sirwilliam wrote:Actually, we only saw Matrix 4, 5, and 6. The first three will be coming out shortly. I think JarJar will be in there as a computer virus :lol:
Not until they release the "Special Editions" of the first three. :rolllaugh:

--Alan

Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 10:46 pm
by Mr Kleen
wouldn't Jar Jar more likely be employed at the Call Center?