Tron: Legacy - Oddly Factual
This post containers sort-of spoilers. Go watch the film first. It's good fun.
And, admittedly, the title is about as close as I'll deliberately come to an outright lie on this blog. I don't think anything in the film really made any real sense, but it was good fun.
I went and saw it in lovely polarised 3D (leaving me with a lovely polarised headache) with a...mixed group of people. Now, once we'd managed to pin down the magic digitising laser as some form of 3D scanner/printer, the other computer person in the group asked me what the ISOs were. I quickly quipped off the reply 'unhandeled seg[mentation] faults'. Of course, this is plainly ridiculous, as proper memory management would be a key part to a system like the grid. However, what they might be is uninitialised memory.
Consider, if you will, that the grid is somewhat like the infinite generated worlds of Minecraft. However, rather than correctly generating a random map based on a set of rules, the values already in the memory. Now, the initial value of physical memory is generally non-determinate: an electronic bit of memory, implemented as a bi-stable latch, can go into either state when power is first supplied to the two gates that make it up - which gate reaches an output voltage that gets registered as a high at the other gate's input determines the initial value. Most memory systems include a reset input, which sets all of the bits of memory to '0', and all good programmer will initialise memory with data they know is valid before attempt to read from the memory. However, quite a lot of the coding of 'The Grid' indicates to me that Fylnn's coding perhaps wasn't up to standards in places, so he might have not initialised the memory properly.
in additions to this, the Grid is huge. The amount of data required to simulate a person is colossal (citation needed), but The Grid seems to also be vast. Amazingly vast. Hugely, amazingly, stunningly vast. ^[Adjective]{4} vast$1. And all of the memory for this must have been loaded at some point. If it wasn't initialised properly, it would contain arbitrary data which, given reasonable entropy and a lot of space, could form usable, parseable data. Enough monkey and enough typewriters and all that will soon lead to programs being formed, in this case the ISOs.
Or course, this leads to the question of why only such perfect things as the ISOs were formed, and where all of the half-formed pig men stuck in rocks which were floating in mid air have gone. Naturally, I have a half-baked explanation for this too - all of this bits of memories were caught as exceptions and errors in the simulation engine, and so got correctly reset. This then left only the parts of the memory which were well-formed: the ISOs. Neat, huh?
All of the 'science' aside, I have one thing more to say:
I. Want. Fylnn's. Coat. Bring it to me.
- 1 ↑ No: I refuse to be sorry. You're reading a blog post about the logic in Tron Legacy.