Ever wonder what the code you see running on screens in movies and television is all about? Is it actually germane to the plot or just a bunch of garbage leading to a close-up shot of a character hitting the “Enter” button? Well, a Tumblr site by the apt name of Source Code in TV and Films seeks to answer that question and features plenty of television shows as well as movies such as Kingsman: The Secret Service, Godzilla and Blackhat, but the one that caught my eye was the above capture from Ex Machina, primarily because it reveals a cool little Easter Egg that most of us never would have found.
Here’s the code:
import sys
def sieve(n):
x = [1] * n
x[1] = 0
for i in range(2,n/2):
j = 2 * i
while j < n:
x[j]=0
j = j+i
return x def prime(n,x):
i = 1
j = 1
while j <= n:
if x[i] == 1:
j = j + 1
i = i + 1
return i – 1
x=sieve(10000)
code = [1206,301,384,5]
key =[1,1,2,2,] sys.stdout.write(“”.join(chr(i) for i in [73,83,66,78,32,61,32]))
for i in range (0,4):
sys.stdout.write(str(prime(code[i],x)-key[i]))
Run that through Python 2.7 and it results in:
As we know, ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number, so you look up that ISBN at Amazon and it takes us to Murray Shanahan‘s “Embodiment and the Inner Life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds“. Shanahan, a professor in cognitive robotics at Imperial College, served as an advisor on the film and Ex Machina writer/director Alex Garland acknowledges Shanahan’s writings inspired him to write the screenplay and in talking to Popular Science Garland said:
I was just an interested layman, and I do what can to understand issues surrounding artificial intelligence. But I often have an intellectual limitation that I run into where information gets too technical and I just don’t have the grounding to track the information. Shanahan presented a strong argument that I felt instinctively attached to. It’s an argument about consciousness, whether it’s in a machine or a human, and it deals with some of the slightly fuzzy abstract philosophical problems that can be thrown into that argument. It was that that appealed to me.
As for Shanahan’s take on Ava, he told The Independent, “The robotics side of things – Ava’s body – we can get to in 10 or 15 years I think, but Ava’s consciousness – we need a couple of conceptual breakthroughs before we get there. But in a basement of some research institute somewhere, it’s possible that these breakthroughs are taking place.”
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, if you haven’t yet seen Ex Machina, get out and do so, it’s one of the best films of 2015.
