wikipediacabal
Most of our sci-fi movies and shows use an imaginary world to explore aspects of our present reality like Star Trek (1996, TV), or just as an exciting fantasy, like Star Wars (1977). In print this kind of story is soft sci-fi. Hard sci-fi looks at what could happen in a realistic future after new scientific discoveries, like 2001 (1968). Travelling Salesman is a hard sci-fi story that adds one new discovery to our world and imagines the consequences for the discoverers.In the movie, four mathematicians confront the US government official who has just overseen their successful breakthrough in math that will enable code breaking of every communication code. The four hope that their work will be made public in order to be applied to many important problems, but the spook makes it clear that their work is top secret and there's to be no negotiation.One of the four, Dr. Horton, has found a further extension of the work which would allow automated reasoning with virtually no limit, something akin to strong AI. He hasn't included this in the published work perhaps out of fear that the applications would be too dangerous. Horton demands that the work be made public. His fellow nerds don't back him.Then after an hour of very stimulating thrust and parry, we get a really unfortunate twist ending. You can stop the DVD at 1:10 with 10 minutes left and get a better movie. The spook tells Horton that his whole family will die if he reveals the work. So Horton goes home and reads over the letter from the President. The watermark is an Illuminati pyramid! Realizing... something... he runs a super-virus program that apparently breaks all the computers in the world. The end.I rate the first hour a 10/10 for those like me who love hard science fiction stories and treasure those few that come along as films. Many audiences won't like it at all. It's not rigorous as far as all the math and terminology (I noticed "SCI classified" and "PSPACE" are not used properly) and a few people who might otherwise be fans will hate that. I studied the real math that the story refers to and that probably helped with my interest in its implications. Viewers should be aware that the film's premise is true, that our current codes could in principle be broken by a scientific breakthrough. The script is all about the ideas and has little interest in characters. It's almost a one-act play as far as staging goes. The final twist is a cheap way to wrap things up. In 2013 we've learned from Edward Snowden that the US NSA has done much more to crack codes worldwide in the past decade than we had known. The NSA has a history of hiring about half of US mathematicians. If they thought there was a chance of making a breakthrough like the one in the film, they would indeed keep it a secret. We now know that in the 70s the NSA discovered differential cryptography, an attack on the DES crypto system that was not rediscovered in the open literature for 20 years. In short the breakthrough and cover-up in the film is plausible politically and perhaps mathematically. Those who enjoyed Travelling Salesman should check out Primer (2004). It is a low budget time travel movie with a similar talk-heavy hard sci-fi orientation.Check the Dr Strangelove homage at 13:20!
poetellect
The University of Pennsylvania's International House hosted the premiere of Timothy Lanzone's exceptional, dynamic, propulsive, timely, genuinely exciting and morally intrepid independent film entitled "Traveling Salesman." Also screened more recently at the NYC International Film Festival, the film is remarkable and evolves along several levels, and with several modalities, all while remaining strictly dialogue-based- no explosions, no graphic sex or (despite one somewhat intense dream-type sequence) violence, no titillating CGI- just strong, compelling, forceful, thought-provoking dialogue. Lanzone both directed and co-wrote the screenplay, a work that can claim direct lineage from the "12 Angry Men" of Reginald Rose and Sidney Lumet, as well as (to a greater or lesser extent) from Darren Aronofsky's groundbreaking "π." Not to mention the subtle homage to Stanley Kubrick.Lanzone has produced a cogent work of cognitive argument, a script of postulation and instruction, all meandering within and around the concepts of foreign policy, physics, mathematics, and the tangible governing laws of our universe. This is a thinking person's movie, and I believe Lanzone to be one of the most intelligent and gifted young filmmakers working in the television/film industries right now. He is surely amongst the best of his generation. It will be interesting to see what future films he concocts, what festivals into which they achieve entry, and what awards they most surely will win. Like Lanzone's mind, this script is expansive- yet very specifically focused, simultaneously.How much of our modern capitalist world is not only completely dependent on, but created by, science and technology? How much of that science and technology is predicated on understanding mathematical laws, i.e. the fundamental governing and thus-far-codified algorithms of physics and space? How much will future hot or cold warfare- and is current cold and hot warfare- between nations based solely on the competitive acquisition of mathematical and physical knowledge? The age-old adage being, of course, that knowledge IS power.The disturbing exploration and answer to these questions, which Lanzone deftly embraces in "Travelling Salesman", is that the entirety, indeed ALL of our world depends upon minds that are able to continually sort through data, see patterns, and form ways of predicting and calculating meaning. Lanzone's script is impressive, perhaps flawless- he references mathematical luminaries such as John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel, and G.H. Hardy as if every person in the general population knows exactly what he is talking about- which I loved.The main import of Lanzone's work is this: how can the United States walk the razor's edge of science in an increasingly cut-throat, competitive world? Where does the line demarking points of no return exist, and how can we be true to what is right, or even know what is right, when knowledge discovered has the power to extrapolate beyond what our imaginations can comprehend?Dr. Tim Horton- played with subtle and raw mastery by Danny Barclay- is the protagonist of the film, the quintessential genius and best-mathematician-of-his-generation, employed (with others) by the United States government to solve a centuries-old question, to develop an algorithm that I can best describe as a mystic's dream- something that can break all codes, predict, quantify and answer any question- a veritable philosopher's stone of physics. Once we obtain this knowledge, we unleash the equivalent of an atomic bomb in potentialities for future conflict- or unity.This character gives an award-accepting speech, spliced throughout the film's progression, in which he explicates how science is becoming more and more divisive than unifying- mathematics was once universal, but now it threatens to unlock and unleash powers that have potentials worse than an atomic bomb. This is such an important topic to be explored, not only in this film, but for the general public as well- we are reaching a point in our history as a species where points of no return become more and more depressingly present.I recently read a journal article detailing Bell's Theorem, a law of quantum physics asserting how objects, once connected, affect each other forever, no matter where they are. It was the Irish physicist John Bell's argument against Bohm's and de Broglie's postulation that "hidden variables" accounted for electrons' non-local, faster-than-the-standard-speed-of-light criterion for entities to be able to affect each other in two separate places. Essentially, inequalities found in laboratory data (this theorem is also referred to as "Bell's Inequality") showed how hidden variables definitely could not fully account for non-local, quantum affectations. There are no "hidden variables." In other words, local realism is false, or at best an outdated explanation mutually exclusive to a transcendent, quantum and always-mysterious reality. Non-localized reversal of effect and cause, Bell's theorem is beautifully counter-intuitive against much of what we learn of western science. This idea that consciousness- an implicate order- transcends our material world is essentially what Lanzone explicates in his fictional mathematician solving the "P = NP" age-old conundrum- the idea that there is a mathematical equation, able to be discovered, that can non-locally act as an oracle, breaking security codes and overwhelming others' ability to cope with or repel such knowledge.How can we quantify and put a price on such knowledge? How can one nation or entity "own" a universal principal? A mathematical algorithm? A genetic cell line? A genetic sequence? "Travelling Salesman" is a film that one can watch repetitively, each time brainstorming more questions, more conundrums, more fractalizations of the eternal mysteries of life and existence and the evolution of human reasoning. This is the realm of the Best Art Has to Offer. Lanzone is a filmmaker- and artist- to surely watch, and follow. Simply unbelievably excellent filmmaking. This is a film to seek out- and it has earned its well-deserved place in the famous New York International Film Festival. Kudos!
