
What a Programmer Sees When He Watches Inception - indiefan
http://latestatic.com/what-a-programmer-sees-when-he-watches-incept
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forkandwait
Inception also understands "Big Oh" ideas -- when you are looping inside the
third level down, you have 10 seconds on the outside giving you 10^3 seconds
on the inside. (EDIT: a single "tick" in one level allows for 20 or so "ticks"
at the next level of dreaming, because of extra brain capacity during sleep.)

Hehe -- I loved the movie...

~~~
ilovecomputers
Except the human brain doesn't have the capacity to process so fast that
seconds turns into years.

None the less, the movie was entertaining and I'm just gonna leave it there. I
know movie logic shouldn't be a comparison to real world logic, but the geek
in me can't help but point out illogical happenings in the film.

~~~
ardit33
in real life dreams are very short. Minutes 1-5. And they feel a lot longer.
We can dream a lot 1-5 spinets withing one hour, and they feel like hours.

Hence you see your dream to shift from one place, to the other. Here is a very
good NOVA documentary on netflix about it:
[http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/What_Are_Dreams_Nova/70129639...](http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/What_Are_Dreams_Nova/70129639?strackid=4624b6968f9b85fa_0_srl&strkid=337777698_0_0&trkid=438381)

~~~
ilovecomputers
I'm referring to turning minutes into decades. I doubt the brain has the
capacity to process that fast.

~~~
CamperBob
As long as it has the capacity to make you _think_ decades are passing, it
doesn't matter that they aren't.

~~~
ilovecomputers
Well Cobb stated that when he and his wife woke up from their limbo, he stated
that they woke up young again, like they lived an entire life. That's what I'm
referring to because that's not thinking you did something but an experience.

------
adbge
I found the movie didn't make a whole lot of sense at times. It felt like the
writer cut a lot of corners when it came to the whole logical coherency of the
plot. Maybe if we blow something up they won't notice!

The plot was entertaining and a good idea, but it left a lot to be desired.
It's not destined to become a classic like: Fight Club, 12 Monkeys, Requiem
for a Dream, Primer. If you enjoyed Inception, do yourself a favor and check
those out if you haven't seen them.

~~~
twism
I felt exactly them same way when I left the theater, but then I thought
"isn't that the way dreams are?"

In dreams (at least mine anyways) there are solutions/objects/processess that
suddenly, without explanation, just materialize out of thin air (but makes
perfect sense while in the dream) to problems/events that occur in the dream
and only realize how absurd the whole thing was when you wake up.

~~~
ilovecomputers
Heh, I felt the same way when I woke up this morning, but it was about the
movie. I always wake up in a pissy mood and this time I was lashing out on
inception, which, boiled down, is an absurd story of boys playing make believe
in a dream and having delusions of grandure.

However, I'm in a better mood now and the movie is still wonderfully
entertaining.

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forkandwait
Furthermore, ... I thought it was interesting the movie only went down 4
levels. I have a rule of thumb when working on hierarchical structures (like a
directory tree holding lots of data) that three levels of hierarchy is all a
person can hold in their head at a time. This is sort of the like the 7 items
+/- 2, except I think that the seven items rule only applies "across" a
structure. To understand more than three levels deep requires supplementary
structures like indexing, sorting, or nesting ...

(of nesting (of nesting (...)))

~~~
waterlesscloud
When they added the 4th level, I explicitly thought to myself "Oh, this is an
effort by the filmmaker to pull us out of logical thought by making it too
much to organize in our heads in real time."

~~~
Scriptor
SPOILERS:

It wasn't too much though, the top two were just sleeping in a plane and a
falling van, which isn't too much to remember. The elevator scene was just him
setting up charges, much more action was happening at the hospital and the
limbo level.

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ardit33
Entering Limbo = Memory Leak. The reference to an object is nullified (the
subject's projection/reference is killed in the dream), so the object is
leaked and there is no way to access it, until either a garbage collection
happens, or when the parent process is stopped. (i.e. the subject is awaken
up).

~~~
nhnifong
Garbage collection offers a nice explanation for why limbo is only a problem
under the influence of the "strong sedative". If garbage collection is a
feature of normal dreaming, the "strong sedative" disables it. If you can
stretch the metaphor further be my guest.

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bitwize
What I thought:

* These dreams are far too cohesive and realistic. Dreams aren't like The Matrix where physics is normal and you do something to it. They're more like weird shit happens _and you accept it as normal_.

* Dreaming nested 3 levels of recursion deep? Done it, didn't need a sedative.

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siglesias
Anybody else think of the book Godel Escher Bach when they were watching this
movie? Beautiful how the movie wraps in on itself like a mobius strip.

~~~
forkandwait
Is this wrapping around because of the first "act", when washes up on shore? I
still don't quite understand how that fits in, if someone cares to elucidate.

~~~
bmalicoat
Spoilers

Don't read if you haven't seen it yet!

Saito dies at some level (if I remember right at the top dream level) and he
enters limbo. Cobb goes there from the snow compound dream level but Saito has
already been there 20-40 years (maybe they said in the movie, I forgot that
too). Cobb then helps him remember Saito is in a dream so they can wake up
together from the limbo state.

~~~
almost
_STILL SPOILERS_

Except they don't, you never see them kill themselves (to exit the dream) or
pass through the other levels of dreams, it just cuts straight to the plane.
Then at the end he sees his kids, but they're _exactly_ as they appear in his
dreams. The top continuing to spin just makes it more explicit.

So he never made it out of limbo, when you see him awaking in the plane that's
just him creating his own reality inside limbo, one where he gets to go back
to his kids.

~~~
naner
"Then at the end he sees his kids, but they're exactly as they appear in his
dreams. The top continuing to spin just makes it more explicit."

Nolan was just doing that to mess with the audience. Yes, the kids were
wearing the same clothes, but the top started wobbling right before it cut
away. So the audience is left not knowing if he is stuck in limbo or not. It
could be interpreted either way.

Anyways, an easy way to tell if you are in a dream without relying on a totem
(in the movie's universe) is to look at an analog clock. The numbers appear
upside down in the dream world. For some reason this was only illustrated once
in the movie.

~~~
pak
I seem to remember some Batman cartoon where Batman realizes he's in a dream
because letters shift around oddly while he's trying to read something.

Indeed, I remember from my own dreams that text and numbers behaves oddly
(disappears/changes when you look around).

I've also heard this technique is used by lucid dreamers
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream>) to figure out that they're
dreaming so they can begin to take control of the dream.

------
bmalicoat
Can someone explain why the zero g scenes didn't cascade down through each
dream level? They were feeling forces in the first dream in the van and those
would go to the hotel but those sleeping there would not feel the same forces
(eg lack of gravity) the next level down.

I did really love the idea behind the totem though, very clever.

~~~
chc
They didn't talk about it explicitly, but in my mind it was connected to how
the guy who got injured felt progressively better each time he went down a
dream level. Dreams are affected by what happens above them, but it's sort of
passed through a filter.

~~~
Scriptor
Exactly, the dreamers in the van are feeling 0g, so they're dreaming in 0g as
well. However, it's still a dream so when you reach the dream-within-a-dream
level, the brain probably defaults to what it's more used to.

------
qbg
What a computer scientist sees is an infinite tower of reflective
interpreters.

------
l0nwlf
'Inception' was a classic example of recursion.

~~~
confuzatron
Not really, just a callstack four* calls deep.

 _...just four?_

Hmm, actually there was multi-threading, using sort of kick-based
synchronisation primitive.

~~~
stingraycharles
_actually there was multi-threading, using sort of kick-based synchronisation
primitive_

I think they actually used an actor-based threading model.

------
jhuckestein
if(depth > 3) return false; else {

    
    
      try {
      // ... do what the OP wrote
      } catch (DeathException D) {
        enterLimboState() ...
      }
    }

------
googler
What if _she_ watches it?

~~~
philk
_What a Programmer Sees When He or She Watches Inception_ does not have the
same panache.

~~~
knome
I've never understood the animosity towards overloading `they` as a neuter
singular pronoun. It doesn't seem to introduce any sort of ambiguity in the
language and replaces a whole slurry of fumbling and hackish attempts with a
single widely understood syllable. It's damned convenient.

Of course, I also hold a disdain for "proper quoting".

~~~
javert
The problem is, when a person uses 'they' as a single pronoun, he seems
uneducated.

~~~
socksy
That's interesting, I don't think it makes one seem anymore uneducated than
any other piece of correctly used grammar (correct use of the word "one",
"none of them is" etc). I wouldn't regard my self as uneducated, having had
the privelege to go to a good (if not public/private) school.

By any chance is this one of those quirks of American grammar usage that I've
not come across before. The only times where I've seen disapproval of the use
of 'they' in that fashion was on the Internet... By any chance is this another
Ame

~~~
pak
"They is so smart!" --> the apparent subject-verb disagreement is just too
unfamiliar to most ears.

~~~
socksy
You are still supposed to use plural declensions despite talking about a
single person.

For instance: "if such a person existed, they were very quiet about their
existence". Note that it's not "they was", which is grammatically incorrect.

