MovieChat Forums > Defending Your Life (1991) Discussion > Binary text.... for big brains?

Binary text.... for big brains?

posted 13 years ago by taxvictim
6 replies | jump to latest

21 years later and this still bugs me: Diamond talks about the big brain stuff, but then he reads a paper that is all ones and zeros. That's supposed to look impressive because it's the same as computers read, but using only two options for each text character is the exact opposite of something big brains would do. Heck, us little brains in the West have 36 unique characters, plus punctuation and math symbols. Japanese and Chinese have hundreds of symbols. For big brains to really impress, they should have a text code that contains thousands or even millions of symbols. Some of them could represent entire sentences or paragraphs.

Diamond could have had a few very slim pamphlets in his office called "War and Peace", "Moby Dick", and "Les Miserables" to demonstrate.

[–] virgiltx 13 years ago

I agree. Binary text would be less efficient and reduce his input to a fraction of standard text, let alone compared to an extended alphabet.

So should we develop an extended alphabet?

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[–] btpayne13 13 years ago

What are you talking about? Of course it's impressive. The fact that there are only 2 characters to decipher written ideas makes it even more difficult than say 36. It's the intricate combinations and patterns of these 1's and 0's that they're trying to get across.

[–] slipzen 12 years ago

Harder does NOT equal smarter. It's like opening a lock with a lockpick when you have the key. Of course it takes a certain amount of skill, but would anyone claim that it's actually the smarter way to open a lock?

Binary digits contains A LOT less information and would only be extremely unpractical. Kind of like writing "plastic box + screen + moving photographs" instead of just writing "tv".

[–] thisnameinuse 11 years ago

It's a momentary prop gag in a movie.

You've entirely missed the point of the scene.

•—•
Just because you SHOT Jesse James don't make you Jesse James.

[–] smoko 11 years ago

@taxvictim Don't you mean 26 unique characters?

Anyways, I hadn't thought about it that way, I just thought the scene was there to show us how Bob's brain was able to compute things that Dan couldn't. But yes, having Chinese characters instead would've made more sense, as they'd communicate more info than ones and zeroes.

[–] Amazon421 8 years ago

I think the 36 unique characters he (she?) meant were the 26 letters of the alphabet plus the numbers 0 thru 9. That equals 36 and you can form any number or word from those base 36 unique characters.