I have often noticed how engineers think very analytically, even about the most mundane/unexpected things. The other day I was having lunch with a bunch of fellow computer science "enthusiasts". One of them declared that he hadn't seen the movie, and here's a snippet of the conversation that followed (spoiler alert...oh, and geek alert too):
C: Inception is like a dream within a dream within a dream...There are multiple levels, sort of like recursion.
AK: Every time you die, you get popped off the stack and go back to your previous dream.
P: But under some circumstances the dream could just hang for a long time, no?
AK: Yes, if you're highly sedated...
C: Sometimes you can't tell if you're dreaming or awake. Leonardo's wife dies because she thinks she's killing herself in a dream, but it's actually real life.
NR: Bad design.
P: Pch. No error handling.
AM: That is why they had the totem. It's like a global variable.
Ah, what would the world be without us engineers...
P.S.: If you're not one of "us", then sorry about the computer jargon. I promise not to do this often.
EDIT: Oh, and what a coincidence - Happy Engineer's Day my brethren!
AK: Every time you die, you get popped off the stack and go back to your previous dream.
P: But under some circumstances the dream could just hang for a long time, no?
AK: Yes, if you're highly sedated...
C: Sometimes you can't tell if you're dreaming or awake. Leonardo's wife dies because she thinks she's killing herself in a dream, but it's actually real life.
NR: Bad design.
P: Pch. No error handling.
AM: That is why they had the totem. It's like a global variable.
Ah, what would the world be without us engineers...
P.S.: If you're not one of "us", then sorry about the computer jargon. I promise not to do this often.
EDIT: Oh, and what a coincidence - Happy Engineer's Day my brethren!
Hehe, ok I will wait for the non-Engineer update!
ReplyDeleteAnd the best thing in this recursion is that ur execution speed increases with every recursive call :) wish this was true in the CS world.
ReplyDeleteoh god.. its disturbing how Paul and I had a very similar conversation after we saw this movie :-s
ReplyDelete@DI - Haha, hang in there. I promise an upcoming non-Engineer update!
ReplyDelete@Anon - Yes, I vaguely remember some equation between speed and recursion level having been worked out.
@Tanz - That's what you get when two engineers get married...
hate to be super-geeky here but given that the situations in the dream worlds (state) persisted across multiple episodes of getting in and out (multiple invocations), I would think that continuations are a better analogy that plain ol' recursion.
ReplyDeleteSee:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation
@Synapse - You may have outgeeked us there :) Interesting concept.
ReplyDelete