Top 10 things Hollywood thinks computers can do

Posted on 29 Apr 2010 at 12:17

A couple of weeks ago we covered the Top 10 biggest tech flaws in films, this week we've got a kind of sequel (in the best Hollywood tradition), and we're looking at the Top 10 myths has about how computers work in the real world. Now we understand the need to 'sex up' computers, as they'd otherwise be incredibly boring, but must these stereotypes persist? If you want it the other way round, we've also got our Top 10 things computers can do (but Hollywood thinks they can't)

10. When systems go wrong, stuff starts to explode

When a computer crashes in real life it's often quite annoying, but spectacularly dull to watch. In films, when a computer goes wrong, it's very exciting and stuff starts to explode. The way computers go wrong depend on the film or TV show.

In Star Trek, Kirk need only ask an alien computer to "Explain. The. Human emotion. Known. As.....Love", for it to go into a bizarre loop where its logical systems can't computer and it explodes. In Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (one of the worst films ever made), the destruction of the main ship causes the droid army to lose its control signal and fail - one of them even has his head fall off. Quite why you'd ever build this feature into your army of destruction is beyond us.

Sparking and exploding control stations is our favourite. Thankfully this doesn't happen in real life - imagine your keyboard exploding just because Windows had crashed again.

9. Guessing a password is easy

In all films when the protagonist gets to a vital computer that's protected by a password, guessing the password is always easy. Given three chances to make the correct choice, the following steps are taken: 1) they type one wrong password, 2) they think hard and type another wrong password, 3) they look round the room they're inhave a flashback to an earlier point in the show, find some inspiration and type in the correct password.

Just see the bit in Watchmen when they correctly guess Ozymandias' password by finding a book on his desk. It's almost as if in Hollywood people are required to enter passwords that are both easy to guess and have some kind of obvious personal connection to the person. And by no means ever should the password contain upper- and lower-case characters or numbers to make them harder to break.

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User comments

A minor correction: V'ger became sentient because aliens took its hardware and original programming and improved on it. Also, it's supposed to have been the sixth Voyager probe, which means that it could very well have been semi-sentient, or at least adaptive, from the start.

Interestingly, the "hardware failure" part actually happened with V'ger - it was hit by debris and damaged, and was repaired by the aliens.

By Julius on 4 May 2010

Point 8 confirms itself

I'm very fuzz, but I have to point this out in this extremely funny article: I believe that Point 8, "Online chats always display each character as its typed" should be... "as IT'S typed"? If so, I find amusing that an article about typing has a typo. Or maybe I'm easily amused.

By tabonga on 6 May 2010

Re: #3

Zooming in to incredible depths on an image didn't become a Hollywood cliche with computers - check out Jimmy Stewart film "Call NOrthside 777" for a scene in which they do the same with a photograph.

By Fairportfan on 6 May 2010

RE: #3

#3 is actually provably possible thanks to compressed sensing and sparsity.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_algorithm
/all/1

By Eosian on 6 May 2010

read before you post...

that technology works on fuzzy pictures... it works to make a sharp image from a fuzzy one, but a picture from say outer space can only be enhance, not zoomed say 2000 times then enhanced.... it won't work.
hence, what the author said.

By toddomy on 8 May 2010

Also for #3 - zooming makes a standard sound

I'm convinced there is a software package sold as a movie and TV "prop", which does almost exactly the same thing on virtually every such scene (boss leans over techie and says "zoom in on this area and enhance!"
Traits of the prop software: zooming uses a rectangular reticle to select the zoom area (corners and crosshairs); and when zooming, the computer always makes this noise: "zug-zug-zug-zug" (as if lenses were being moved by small motors)
If I've seen and heard this once, I've seen and heard it a thousand times.
I just wish I could find out the name of that prop software...

By birdbrainscan on 14 May 2010

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