Ten badass brainy computers from science fiction
Computers used to be our loyal servants. But slowly and surely, we've let them control us. I used to believe these machines had the ability to positively change the world, but after the 56K modem invented Dubstep in the 1990s, I've been somewhat sceptical. So have film makers. Boost a PC with a new processor these days and …
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You forgot The Vortex
who caused minor celebs who failed the grid challenge to walk home from the planet Arg.
Re: You forgot The Vortex
oh, if we are going down the game show tangent albeit loosely, then surely you need to include, Dusty Bin from 3-2-1 with Ted Rogers, The thing from Catch Phrase with Roy Walker and i'm sure there's loads more. What about that thing on Snog, Marry, Avoid? Not that I watch it :)
Back to the silver screen however number Johnny Five from Short Circuit surely must get a mention.... "input Stephanie, Input".
There can be only one.
Assimovs creation Multivac - From the first punch card version, asked what happens to us when the stars go out. To the multi spacial entity that was laft at the end of all entropy. Multivac said "Let there be light!"
Re: There can be only one.
Assimov? Multivac? Not sure what kind of movie you've been watching ;-)
I know, we're probably losing the battle against the "would ofs" and "their / they're / theres" in the world, but at least try to spell names correctly.
Re: There can be only one.
For those wanting to look it up the story title is "The Last Question", and I doubt anyone could make a film that really did the story justice.
re 2001
" ... HAL turns fruit loop when ordered to lie to the astronauts in its care."
As I remember, in the book, the builders had put a remote controlled 'kill device' in HAL. This was some kind of mechanical cutter than would disconnect his main power feed. Somehow, he found out about this and that had consequences for his 'mental state'. Was that just one part of HAL's problem?
Have I got this right?
Re: re 2001
No, you're mangling 2001 and 2010 (when they put in the kill device, and then Doc Chandra quietly took it out again when nobody was noticing).
I always felt rather sorry for HAL --- he wasn't evil, he was driven insane by bad management and unfollowable orders. Even so trying to kill everyone on board is a little extreme; all he really needed was a little primal scream therapy.
he was driven insane by bad management and unfollowable orders
I can relate to that, which is why I'm not allowed near real people now...
Re: re 2001
Thank you for that David, and thank you for reminding me that I also read 2010 :)
(Was it really so long ago?)
Re: re 2001
In the book it was something about him thinking they were going to deactivate him because he got a calculation wrong, which similar units on earth didn't, which he knew about because he intercepted the communication sent to the ship with this revelation and his mission was top be able to take over if among happened to the crew. Therefore he decided that killing the crew was the only safe way for him to carry out the mission.
No lip reading or any such nonsense, just cold hard logic.
Re: re 2001
I'd imagine they used radio. I haven't done the calculation, but I'd guess it would take too long for snailmail to make it across the solar system...
Re: re 2001
HAL becomes best space-ghost buddies with Dave Bowman in 2061 and 3001...
I thought when I saw Electric Dreams had an amazon "buy me" link, that they had finally done a region 1 dvd. Wellm at least I have the soundtrack.
By the way, give Jeff Lynne some credit on that too - half the songs sound like his work, and one of them (the kick-ass "let it run") was.
Johnny 5
If you've every had to sit through Short Circuit, you'll know why Johnny 5 is the most evil and malevolent self aware aritificial intelligence of all time
Why no mention of V'Ger? Or has the universal choice made to wipe the existence of Star Trek 1 from our collective memories caused it to vanish? Admittedly it didn't go completely schizo, but wasn't exactly mentally stable.
Because V'Ger and the whole damn first movie was just a remake of Season 2 Episode 3 ST-TOS, Nomad should have kicked his butt for copyright infingement! Now there was an emotionless killing machine if I ever saw one, an indestructible planet destroying space probe....of course they destroyed it....one up for the fleshies!
Probably before most people's time...
How about 'Box' from Star Cops?
Mistake Not...
Surely you need at least one reference to the Culture. My favourite has to be the Mistake Not... Or, by it's full name: Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath.
You really can't get any more badass than a name like that for an AI.
Re: Mistake Not...
But these, sadly, have never been seen in a film. I don't think anybody could make a film of the Culture novels.
Re: Mistake Not...
Pfft...typical up-it's-own-arse Culture Mind.
I haven't read Hydrogen Sonata yet - is it any good?
Re: Mistake Not...
Course you could film a culture novel. "Inversions" wouldn't even cost you much in special effects. "The Player of Games" would cost a lot more, but surely no harder than "Lord of the Rings"?
Making "Excession" interesting on screen would be a challenge.
Re: Mistake Not...
When asked how he would like one of his books to be made into a film, Iain Banks replied "With a fucking big budget".
I had heard rumblings of a short story "A Gift from The Culture" being developed for film, but it seems to have died off- google search results seem to date around 2009. My fantasy director would be Neils Blomkamp or Duncan Jones.
V'Ger?
How can you ignore V'Ger? Not only the brain the size of a planet but literally the size of a planetary nebula. And looking for it's creator.
Shame on you for using the picture of "Deep Thought" from that awful Disney movie. The only real Deep Thought is the one from the BBC series.
What about GLaDOS?
Surprised she didn't show up in here?
Re: What about GLaDOS?
I guess because not in a movie ... yet!
Gendo Pose: GET ME UWE BOLL ON THE BLOWER!
Anyways, check out this CNET stuff. No reference to Black Hole's Max or SHODAN or the Harlan Ellison Superevil Supercomputer though:
Poor HAL 9000. Rating: Mwahahaha!
Proteus IV. Rating: Mwahahahaha!
Star Trek's Nomad. Rating: Mwahahahaha!
Superman 3: The Ultimate Computer. Rating: Mwahahaha!
Max from "The Thirteenth Floor". Rating: Mwahaha!
Mother from hell category: GlaDOS from "Portal". Rating: Mwaha!
WTF category: MODOK from Marvel Comics. Rating: Mwahahahaha!
Queeg500 from Red Dwarf. Rating: Mwaha!
Skynet from the Terminator Franchise. Rating: Mwahahahaha!
The Green Death from Dr. Who. Rating: Mwahahahahaha!
Re: What about GLaDOS?
Thanks for the 13th Floor reminder! I'd completely forgotten about Scream!
Still, if we're including that, the building computer in Philip Kerr's Gridiron - where the son of the control systems programmer playing Doom on it sends it batshit and it treats all the occupants as Doom players - should be on the list.
The Prisoner
There is another one which comes to mind - The General in "The Prisoner". Not really badass and of unsecured sentience. Also probably the only machine ever that blows up when you show it a picture of Tony Kornheiser.
Re: The Prisoner
Compare "The General" to Wheatley:
GLaDOS in a surprise attack moment: Hey, Moron!
Wheatley: Oh, Hello.
GLaDOS: All right, Paradox time!!. THIS. SENTENCE. IS. FALSE!!
GLaDOS to herself: Don't think about it, don't think about it!
Wheatley: Um, true. I'll go with true. There, that was easy. To be honest, I might have heard that one before.
GLaDOS (Uncredulous): It's a paradox! There IS no answer.
Sentient?
The Star Trek ship's computer & Mother would be, under the Revelation Space classification, beta-level intelligences, giving the appearance and responses of a fully sentient consciousness.
IIRC there are two occasions in TNG where the ship's computer becomes fully conscious - can't remember the first one, and the second is toward the end of S7 where a whole new lifeform is born aboard the Enterprise. Generally AI in the Trek universe has been confined to androids (Data) & holograms (various holodeck episodes, the Dr from Voyager) - and indeed V'Ger in ST: The Motion Picture.
Re: The Matrix - what about The Source? The original, human-built AI that appears in the Machine City at the end of Revolutions? Not part of the Matrix, and certainly responsible for a lot of D&D (altho in the Animatrix: The Second Renaissance we see that humanity was pretty much the cause of it's own downfall on that front, treating sentient beings like shit), so I call foul on not including The Source.
The Machine Stops
It's not in a movie yet, but I think it should be... this story by E.M. Forster from 1909 might be one of the more interesting and pertinent tales of our reliance and relationship to technology:
Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard 'cell', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine... Communication is made via a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine called the speaking apparatus, with which people conduct their only activity, the sharing of ideas and knowledge... a kind of religion is re-established, in which the Machine is the object of worship. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own... the knowledge of how to repair the Machine has been lost. Finally the Machine apocalyptically collapses, bringing 'civilization' down with it." <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops"> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops </a>
Re: The Machine Stops
Strange... I can no longer hyperlink :/
Re: The Machine Stops
... and on the very first page there is a description of what could have been the forerunner of all tablet computers.
Prior art indeed!
Re: Prior Art
Sorry to do this, as I'm really enjoying the comments on this thread, but people saying something they read in a book or saw on TV is prior art is right up there with people who say borrow when they mean lent, their instead of they're and also people that can't open fucking cereal boxes without mutilating them and yes I'm talking about my wife.
*counts to ten*
Anyway the point is that only real things that actually work can be prior art, which is pretty sensible when you think about it.
Re: The Machine Stops
Not a film but there's this BBC adaptation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvrGUnIFuRs
Re: The Machine Stops
That was a very prescient story. People live in their own rooms and rarely meet other people in the flesh, Their own choice of music plays in their room.
They occupy their time by using their video screen to access vast archives of information which they then rehash as their own thoughts.
Re: Prior Art
> Anyway the point is that only real things that actually work can be prior art
That's not true. Fictional devices can be prior art.
> which is pretty sensible when you think about it.
No, it's not.
If you're trying to claim that you invented the idea of a device, then it being known if fiction pretty much precludes that claim.
If, on the other hand, you're patenting the *way* you got it working, then the fictional device is unlikely to be prior art as it is unlikely to have specified its methods.
Vic.
Lexx
Huge organic sentient living space ship entity with a penchant for blowing up planets at a whim all to the strains of advanced trance rock music. Nominally female.
What about V.I.K.I from 'I, Robot'?
Ok the film had bog all to do with Asimov's work, and was basically a rewrite of Jack Williamson's 'The Humanoids'. But still bad arse in a helpful way.
Never program an AI to "'To serve and obey and guard men from harm" - it won't end happily.
...the Borg?
Not mainframe per se, more of a clustering hive entity that was self-aware with an implacable way of assimilating... well, everything. Difficult to like...
... the Cylons?
At least that one had an interesting premise. (Was it chosen to minimize the effects budget needed? )
I stick to old computer names when doing PDC's in dental IT: Usually from this lot:
LLANDRU - Star Trek
COLOSSUS - Bletchley Park and, of course, The Forbin Project
GUARDIAN (The Forbin Project)
ZEN (Blake's 7)
QUEEG (Red Dwarf)
GEORGE - The (Original) Avengers, Steed & Co
TENCH889 (A Maze of Death)
SID (UFO)
BATCOMPUTER (original Batman)
KITT (Knight Rider)
etc etc
So much better than PDC01...
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