ChessMess Wrote:Good points both. I guess the MCP didn't just delete Flynn because his core routines were programmed around a game and thus why he did what he did. Hmmm ok so the grid is a 3d environment that loads the 'user model' and issues an initialize command to. The model itself is fully encapsulated running its own 'unique' code (we can't think too hard on this otherwise the whole movie premise falls apart). Thus when the laser prints out the template, it contains the current state of the model which contains the new experiences which is why they remember their grid experience. Does that work?

That's what I was thinking, yeah. Though it seems that only the template's mental state is updated, not its physical one. That's why we had Flynn reappear in the real world dressed in jeans and sneakers in the original Tron, and Sam returning to the real world in the clothes he left in, despite their Grid equivalents being cut off of him and thrown in the trash at the beginning of the movie.

Though if that's the case, it would mean that if Flynn had made it to the portal, he would have found himself back in his body from '89...

Pilgrim1099 Wrote:I think the shooting script is finalized by the director as he consults with the storyboard artist(s). So the director has to go with the writers' format and make the best out of it. We're very lucky because this guy happened to have experience in architecture and he knew what he was doing, and not screwing around. It's very interesting to see how Joseph had the discipline and experience working in an architecture firm and then doing commercials, especially one with Gears of War for XBox 360 with such focus, whereas, one would question if the writing team really had focus compared to him.

The Tron: Legacy screenplay was the weakest part of the movie, IMO. It's a damn shame, too - when reading about the thought that went into the art design, or looking at the attention to detail when characters use computers in the real world (actual *nix commands!) - it always hits me how much of a labor of love Legacy was for the production staff. The writing is where things stumble, making the movie fall just short of greatness. Joe Kosinski deserves tremendous credit for doing as much as he did with the script he had to work with. I'm looking forward to Oblivion, and I'd love to see what he could do with a Legacy sequel with a stronger script.

Kat Wrote:Right, that's essentially what I'm asking. But even if not, how does the laser know exactly how to recreate everything to reflect your changed experiences? It's not knowledgeable in neuroscience, et al, so it wouldn't know how to set up all of those electrical impulses, etc. to reflect anything but what it read when you went in, right?

For the laser/portal to work the way we see it working in the movies, it would have to be able to do just that.

If it was only being used for transportation, the device would just have to map and store the data on all the particles in the target. There would be no need for it to 'understand' anything about that object. That's the easy part. (And by 'easy', I mean 'monstrously difficult'. Easy is relative here.)

To be able to digitize someone via scanning laser and 'scan them into the computer', you're going to need a system capable of not only taking that digital snapshot, but analyzing that data and generating a 'virtual machine' based on the User's brain structure (physical/electrical/biochemical) that can run on the Grid. It's also going to have to be able to do the reverse again later - take that digital image of the User's mind and generate an updated physical brain model from it when it's time for him to leave again.

Though Flynn was a brilliant coder and a visionary in the tech field, I don't think he was an expert on brain function. Lora and Gibbs were developing the laser as a transportation device, so there would be no reason for them to implement functionality like that. I imagine it was only possible for Flynn to be transported 'into' the Encom system like that was thanks to the MCP - it's a powerful AI that's already subsumed numerous other systems into itself by the start of Tron. I'm assuming some of those systems were medical, which would have given the MCP a working grasp of neuroscience, and that the MCP had the sheer computing power needed to interpret that data and build a working Flynn 'image' from it. I imagine Flynn would have tried to locate and salvage the subroutines the MCP had created to do this from the Encom mainframe when constructing his personal Grid...

What if the grid resides within a "real world" that itself is virtual and everything actually is an experiment in artificial intelligence sentience being done by Flynn at Encom?

The whole first movie was "Rule of Cool" writ large, a magical "what if" fantasy about the concept of what if there was a world within the computer where the programs are people and the functions of the computer are their environmental factors. The laser was a deus ex machina to that end, but it was in story function no different than a wizard's spell.

Really, think about it. There is no way in holy hell that anything like a world simulation or sentient minds could be simulated on 1980s hardware. Not no way, not no how. Remember the guy that Flynn fought in the game with the rings and the ball thingy? He was an accounting program. A circa 1982 accounting program. His entire code was probably a few kilobytes in size. There just isn't any remotely plausible way that the original world of Tron was in any way a VR simulation running on contemporary hardware.

The first movie was pure science fantasy, plain and simple.

The second tried to update the concept for modern, more computer literate audiences by positing the simulation idea. It's still impossible on 2010 hardware, but so is the digitizing laser so suspension of disbelief right? Still, the second movie still proposes the events of the first film happened. Thus, we're right back to magicsville with the fully developed interactive world inside 1982 hardware with tiny little 1982 utility programs displaying a full range of human thought and emotions. It just plain can't happen. At least, not by any understanding of computer science or physics as we know it.

Thus, the TRON world MUST have a radically different set of laws by which it operates. Somehow, there, even the most rudimentary computer hardware and software are an environment and people from the inside, and there is a small world inside of every computer. How? Hell if I know. But that's how it works.

That means, because it's a world with radically different physics, that yes people and things can go into the computer, experience a world and events there and interact with programs as if they were people (which they seem to in fact be), and stuff from inside can come out the same way. Flynn said so. CLU had it planned downto the last 1 and 0. And Quorra in fact did come out, proving it can happen.

How? Again, hell if I know. But we have all the proof we need that in the imaginary world that the TRON films take place in, it is possible and in fact does happen.

I could make up some blather about quantum mechanics and the personification of iinformation, and it might even sound good. I just might be able to craft it in a way where it sounds kinda feasible, in some other universe where things are put together differently. But I'm not a physicist, and neither are anyone who worked on the films. And that's just fine, because it's a fiction story and real world physics only apply as much as we want them to. If the story requires otherwise, we can change the rules and that's what we have an imagination for.

So to summarize:

NO people and things can not be zapped in and out of a computer

NO a full simulated environment with all senses cannot exist in 2010 computers, let alone 1982

HELL NO can any normal computer program such as a script or utility ever act as a humanlike person, and wecan't even do a convincing fake AI yet let alone a real sentient one

YES all these things happened in the two TRON films.

Conclusion: Our laws of physics and facts about the nature of our universe do not apply.

For me, it really comes down to verisimilitude. Things need to feel like they should work.

The original Tron worked for me. I had no problem accepting the whole 'secret lives of programs' premise, the idea that at some level there existed a realm that took its shape from our computers and information networks. A place where programs existed as stylized reflections of their creators and their lives played out in broad strokes as reflections of real-world computing events. And if it were possible to somehow convert a living person into an information construct, they'd be able to experience life from a program's perspective.

That premise is part of what made the movie special, at least in my eyes. I didn't need to know how this parallel universe could exist in order to accept it - it was a fundamental rule of the setting that this was a thing, and everything else just proceeded logically from it. It was consistent. It explained why an 80's era mainframe could apparently host a complex virtual world, and why, say, a network monitor application would appear as a larger-than-life hero figure there. It fired the imagination - what were the inhabitants of the digital universe experiencing as I wrote code and entered commands? It also created all sorts of potential storytelling possibilities, some of which were explored in the criminally underrated PC game 'sequel', Tron 2.0. (Which has sadly been demoted to non-canon status with the release of Legacy.)

Legacy... *sigh* Had the original Tron never been made, I would have been able to accept the idea that wonder boy-turned-CEO Kevin Flynn had created a virtual world in the basement of his arcade, as an offshoot of teleportation technology the company was experimenting with in the early 80's. Realistically, you'd need insane amounts of computing power for that. Maybe Encom had built the first working quantum computer way back when, specifically for that purpose, and it had such vast processing power and storage capacity that it could support a simulation of that complexity. Somehow. It'd be a slight stretch, but I don't think I'd have a hard time explaining away any minor plausibility issues to my satisfaction if that was the case.

It's trying to jam these two completely disparate ideas together and somehow make them work that seriously impacts my suspension of disbelief. Handwaving the problems with the argument that it's a different system doesn't work for me - it's like saying that gravity would work differently for me if I went to Europe. Tron established some ground rules, chief among them being that every real-world program has a fully-realized living counterpart in the digital universe. Things in that realm took on forms not because anyone in the real world made a deliberate decision for them to look that way, but because a data structure here would appear as, say, a house there. Legacy seems to want us to believe something else altogether. It's like the writers couldn't find it in themselves to write within the Tron universe as established, and wanted to rework the setting into some sort of Matrix-esque thing to better suit their interests (or the perceived interests of their target audience), and to hell with what had gone before. Meh.

Argent Wrote:It's trying to jam these two completely disparate ideas together and somehow make them work that seriously impacts my suspension of disbelief. Handwaving the problems with the argument that it's a different system doesn't work for me - it's like saying that gravity would work differently for me if I went to Europe. Tron established some ground rules, chief among them being that every real-world program has a fully-realized living counterpart in the digital universe. Things in that realm took on forms not because anyone in the real world made a deliberate decision for them to look that way, but because a data structure here would appear as, say, a house there. Legacy seems to want us to believe something else altogether. It's like the writers couldn't find it in themselves to write within the Tron universe as established, and wanted to rework the setting into some sort of Matrix-esque thing to better suit their interests (or the perceived interests of their target audience), and to hell with what had gone before. Meh.

I've said it before, I'll say it again, T:Legacy was not simply a sequel but in fact a soft reboot. It referenced the first film for the fans, sure, but it also retconned a lot of it. That's why TRON 2.0 is not and can not be canon anymore, because the original TRON itself is only quasi-canon now. The old rules no longer apply., and trying to reconcile them is pointless. The rules have been changed.

1982 was a very different place. I know, I was there. Computers were a new, wondrous and magical thing and the flight of fancy that each and every computer had a little self-contained world in it where your programs were people was fascinating. It played on the inherent mysteriousness of computers to the average person though, and there's a good chance that a modern audience that grew up with computers as ubiquitous as televisions would balk. There's no aura of awe and mystery surrounding computers now, and a lot less room for fantasy about them.

Now as I said, I could probably come up with a plausible-sounding explanation involving quantum physics and the observer principle causing information to personify when interacting with living minds, and it might fly. But the producers were clearly concerned about the audience's ability to suspend disbelief and so updated it to involve things they knew would understand, ie virtual realities and simulations. That's actually easier to poke holes in because it's close enough to reality to contradict things we know (like no supercomputer ever built could run that sort of simulation now or in the immediate future), but to the average person it's easy enough to buy into.

If I was writing the sequel, I'd introduce the magic back into it with the quantum thingy I proposed above. I'd have Sam talk to Alan and be like "you know, there's something I don't get. How in the hell did my dad get a simulation like that to run on a 1980s mainframe? I've got video games running on brand new gear that can't even come close." Alan would then lay the bombshell on him that it's not a simulation but in fact a world, and Flynn didn't create it, he discovered it. And he spent all his time afterwards trying to figure out how in the hell it worked.

Alan would then explain that right before things went south with CLU, Flynn believed he'd cracked it and was getting ready to reveal it to the world. He didn't want to do that until he understood enough about it to explain it to people,which is why he kept it secret for so long. He'd mentioned it briefly to Alan, "something about the quantum observer principle resulting in the personification of information when in contact with sentient minds" and that any information system complex enough would spontaneously develop such an internal world. He'd promised a full explanation with all the scientific data he'd collected, but that never happened. Now, the only one who ever truly understood how it works is Kevin Flynn, and he's gone.

It solves the plot holes decently enough, and reconciles the two films about as smoothly as I think it's possible to. Until they do that though, consider Legacy a retcon and where it contradicts TRON, the newer information is to be taken as fact for the purposes of understanding Legacy.

emdeesee Wrote:[//b]Alan pulled an Encom ePhone from the breast pocket of his jacket and began thumbing through his contact list....

(nice! continuing)

When Alan got off the phone, he noticed Sam staring at his smartphone. Raising an eyebrow, he asked him what was on his mind.

"Umm, you said any information system complex enough? Cuz phones now are stronger than mainframes were back then..."

Alan nodded. "Exactly. There should be a Grid inside each of them. Just like any other computer. The more robust the system, the larger and more complex the world inside of ... what's wrong?"

He'd noticed that Sam had begun to look distinctly sick, and while he could guess why the reason was confirmed in the young man's nervous reply.

"Before the Lumia I had an iPhone for a little while... I uhh... dropped it. In a toilet."

Alan softly winced. "Ouch."

Sam nodded grimly. "Yeah..."

It wasn't every day you found out you'd caused a small apocalypse.

ISOlatedThinker Wrote:Do you think during the digitation process that one visually sees the cube effect that we witnessed during the digitizing scene? it's possible that one's memory is being imprinted with that cube effect..like their consciencousness is being put back together?

We don't know what exactly if anything the person sees while being scanned, and given that they're completely frozen they might only see a still image of whatever was in front of their eyes when they were hit.

However, in TRON we did get a nice extended sequence of a portal-like transition that ended with Flynn being rezzed in on the detention level of the gamegrid. I've always interpreted that as a first person view of what it's like to be transported into the system. Most likely you experience that view as a disembodied consciousness, before being rezzed in.

For some reason, Legacy chose not to show us that view, and it's a shame because it would have been nice to see how the same basic sequence changed between 1982 and 2010 CGI technology.

DarthMeow504 Wrote:Something to consider: At the very end of TRON, Flynn greets what appears to be Alan and Lora on the roof of Encom, but he treats them as VIP guests (rather than well known employees) and he welcomes them with the line "Greetings, programs!" The credit sequence then shows the cityscape melting into a dark pattern with flowing lights, melding the real world with Grid-like visuals. The clear implication is the real world is more like the Grid than we realize, and will become closer still. More importantly, that greeting itself strongly implies that the pair is in fact not Alan and Lora, but Tron and Yori. That would mean that even the original TRON ended with programs coming into the real world and the ending of Legacy with Quorra only mirrors that original ending. Food for thought.

Whoa, that would be mind bending, although I dont think that was what was intended. It seemed to me that he treated Alan and Lora as close friends, which they were. Alan even says "Here comes the boss." Neat idea though.