The Matrix
Location: O’City Hotel
Date: March 31st, 1999
Breaking in room 303 of the O’City Hotel, an armed police squad is attempting to take down
Trinity, an ill-famed hacker. Like a Jack-in-the-box, Trinity miraculously escapes with some
acrobatic jumping, leaving a lot of question marks hanging over us: who is the fiercely beautiful
Trinity? How come she has these skills? Why some apparently bad guys are chasing her? Why do
they all wear sunglasses?
Welcome to Matrix, a film that generated a huge impact both in literature and in movies. In many
ways, it is not the first of its kind, but it surely sets a milestone through its ground-breaking
technology, its acrobatic moves, and not-so-subtle philosophical messages.
The film’s plot is staggering: humans are fighting against sentient machines that were created in the
21st century and had, since then, taken control of the Earth. Machines are keeping the enslaved
humans under control through a simulation of the world as it was in 1999. To gather the required
energy, machines use the sleeping human bodies as a source of energy.
One day, however, a group of humans managed to disconnect from the Matrix and recruited Neo, a
hacker that has lived in this simulated world since birth, to revolt against the Machines.
This film left us also a lot of memorable quotes; one of my favorites is a cameo of Philip K. Dick’s
speech we mentioned a while back:
Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.
Did you ever consider we might be living in a Matrix as well? A simulation where we humans are
efficiently controlled for some mysterious purposes by a higher power?
Creating a simulation that is indistinguishable from reality is still beyond our current technological
capability. Even so, we can predict with a reasonable approximation the growth of computer
processing capacity in the near future.
Like a pendulum, for over 50 years, the so-called Moore’s law has set the pace for innovation and
development. The simplified version of this law, drafted by Moore in 1965, states that the speed of
processors, or overall processing power for computers, will double every two years. This
exponential growth has so far led to an incredible increase in computer processing capabilities while
reducing both the size and the cost of for producing this technology.
As a matter of fact, in 1960 a computer had about 2300 transistors that made up its processing
capacity. 50 years later, some computers have reached 5 billion transistors. Moore predicted that
this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. How much computing power can we get today with such computers? If we take as reference the heavyweight champion of this category, the Chinese “Sunway Taihu Light”, we can reach the astonishing figure of 93 petaflops of operations per second. To be clear, a petaflop is a number with 15 zeros that ink-savvy people can also write as 10^15 .
Is it possible to simulate the thinking mechanism of the human being with so much computing
power? In small part yes: at present, we can simulate a significant amount of nerve cells in the
human brain, about 1.73 billion neurons. For non-neurological enthusiasts, we still speak of small
numbers, around 1-2% of the average cells of an adult. Let's say that with current super-computers
we can barely simulate the blink of an eye, at most.
Is it just a matter of time then? Giving voice to skeptics, we will never be able to fully simulate the
functioning of the human brain, since the path of miniaturization, just like the increase in the
density of transistors, has reached the limits of Quantum mechanics. In other words, traditional
chips are approaching the natural limits of matter.
Precisely this limit, however, is opening the way to a change of paradigm that wants to exploit the
strange ability of subatomic particles, to reach immense computing powers, without the limit of
miniaturization of the circuits.
In Quantum computing, the units of information are encoded in a tiny particle of matter called
“qubits” that performs complex calculations in parallel to an unimaginable speed, even compared
with today’s super-computers.
What makes this magic possible is an inherent peculiarity of Quantum mechanics, i.e., the
“Principle of Indeterminacy,” by which the elementary units of a machine, do not have a definitive
value until observation. That is to say, they can assume the classical binary values 0 and 1, plus any
possible superposition of these values.
Compared with standard computing, a Quantum system will be able to process -through parallel
computation- more solutions to a single problem rather than performing sequential calculations as it
now happens with electronic processing.
Is Quantum computing the key for solving extremely complex problems, such as simulating human
beings? Nobody can answer that yet, although physicists agree that a Quantum computer with just
50 qubits could outperform even the world’s most powerful super-computers.
Tech giants like Google and IBM are racing to develop a quantum computer of this likes: any day
now, expect to see on the headlines the achievement of “Quantum Supremacy.”
Date: March 31st, 1999
Breaking in room 303 of the O’City Hotel, an armed police squad is attempting to take down
Trinity, an ill-famed hacker. Like a Jack-in-the-box, Trinity miraculously escapes with some
acrobatic jumping, leaving a lot of question marks hanging over us: who is the fiercely beautiful
Trinity? How come she has these skills? Why some apparently bad guys are chasing her? Why do
they all wear sunglasses?
Welcome to Matrix, a film that generated a huge impact both in literature and in movies. In many
ways, it is not the first of its kind, but it surely sets a milestone through its ground-breaking
technology, its acrobatic moves, and not-so-subtle philosophical messages.
The film’s plot is staggering: humans are fighting against sentient machines that were created in the
21st century and had, since then, taken control of the Earth. Machines are keeping the enslaved
humans under control through a simulation of the world as it was in 1999. To gather the required
energy, machines use the sleeping human bodies as a source of energy.
One day, however, a group of humans managed to disconnect from the Matrix and recruited Neo, a
hacker that has lived in this simulated world since birth, to revolt against the Machines.
This film left us also a lot of memorable quotes; one of my favorites is a cameo of Philip K. Dick’s
speech we mentioned a while back:
Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat?
Neo: It might have been. I'm not sure.
Morpheus: Switch! Apoc!
Neo: What is it?
Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.
Did you ever consider we might be living in a Matrix as well? A simulation where we humans are
efficiently controlled for some mysterious purposes by a higher power?
Creating a simulation that is indistinguishable from reality is still beyond our current technological
capability. Even so, we can predict with a reasonable approximation the growth of computer
processing capacity in the near future.
Like a pendulum, for over 50 years, the so-called Moore’s law has set the pace for innovation and
development. The simplified version of this law, drafted by Moore in 1965, states that the speed of
processors, or overall processing power for computers, will double every two years. This
exponential growth has so far led to an incredible increase in computer processing capabilities while
reducing both the size and the cost of for producing this technology.
As a matter of fact, in 1960 a computer had about 2300 transistors that made up its processing
capacity. 50 years later, some computers have reached 5 billion transistors. Moore predicted that
this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. How much computing power can we get today with such computers? If we take as reference the heavyweight champion of this category, the Chinese “Sunway Taihu Light”, we can reach the astonishing figure of 93 petaflops of operations per second. To be clear, a petaflop is a number with 15 zeros that ink-savvy people can also write as 10^15 .
Is it possible to simulate the thinking mechanism of the human being with so much computing
power? In small part yes: at present, we can simulate a significant amount of nerve cells in the
human brain, about 1.73 billion neurons. For non-neurological enthusiasts, we still speak of small
numbers, around 1-2% of the average cells of an adult. Let's say that with current super-computers
we can barely simulate the blink of an eye, at most.
Is it just a matter of time then? Giving voice to skeptics, we will never be able to fully simulate the
functioning of the human brain, since the path of miniaturization, just like the increase in the
density of transistors, has reached the limits of Quantum mechanics. In other words, traditional
chips are approaching the natural limits of matter.
Precisely this limit, however, is opening the way to a change of paradigm that wants to exploit the
strange ability of subatomic particles, to reach immense computing powers, without the limit of
miniaturization of the circuits.
In Quantum computing, the units of information are encoded in a tiny particle of matter called
“qubits” that performs complex calculations in parallel to an unimaginable speed, even compared
with today’s super-computers.
What makes this magic possible is an inherent peculiarity of Quantum mechanics, i.e., the
“Principle of Indeterminacy,” by which the elementary units of a machine, do not have a definitive
value until observation. That is to say, they can assume the classical binary values 0 and 1, plus any
possible superposition of these values.
Compared with standard computing, a Quantum system will be able to process -through parallel
computation- more solutions to a single problem rather than performing sequential calculations as it
now happens with electronic processing.
Is Quantum computing the key for solving extremely complex problems, such as simulating human
beings? Nobody can answer that yet, although physicists agree that a Quantum computer with just
50 qubits could outperform even the world’s most powerful super-computers.
Tech giants like Google and IBM are racing to develop a quantum computer of this likes: any day
now, expect to see on the headlines the achievement of “Quantum Supremacy.”
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