Travelling Salesman

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Audience Member TL;DR: Not much science and a lot of technobabble with a thin coating of ethics. Stay away in droves. Much ado about nothing. Firstly, there's a lot of talk about NP complete problems, and not much talk about why we care or how they work. Secondly, this is nearly as boring as "My Dinner with Andre". Lots-o-talk, not much plot. There's a lot of "As you Know Bob..." type exposition. A little like "12 Angry Men" but not nearly as convincing. There are lots of confusing claims about the power of P=NP. Apparently, making all problems solvable in polynomial time means ... all systems are hackable. So, one guy can take down the world. It's quite a stretch from reality. This movie wants to draw a parallel between the Manhattan Project and the ability to solve difficult computing/mathematical problems quickly. Such a thing would make encryption (as used in passwords and internet security) easily defeated. So, the government villain wants to make sure only the USA has the knowledge and asks the eggheads to trust him. The film ends with a strange scene where our hero (the lone holdout) reads the letter from the White House and sees a watermark of the "all-seeing eye" in the paper and decides to shut down the internet/power grid over the entire earth. Apparently this was his ace in the hole. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, he walks alone into the distance like Bill Bixby at the end of every episode of The Hulk. The performances are fine and the grainy video sets a somber tone. But there's nothing redeeming about this movie. It doesn't educate anyone on anything. It isn't a warning call on the precarious situation our interconnectedness gives us - because it's all about P vs. NP. This is a rambling collection of factoids about modern technology and the danger of someone taking over the world through tech. It's mostly nonsensical technobabble with at thin veneer of ethics. Stay away in droves. Instead try "Taming the Quantum World." It's a documentary and will shed more light than "Traveling Salesman" even thinks about. Rated 0.5/5 Stars •  Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 02/12/23 Full Review Audience Member Interesting film exploring the ethical problems that would be unleashed if solving NP hard problems suddenly became easy (perhaps with quantum computing?). Who should control that power? In the Internet of Things, if encryption can be easily defeated bad things can happen. While we probably won't solve NP-hard problems anytime soon, this movie highlights the dangers of our overly connected and questionably secure systems. Extra star here if you studied computer science. :) Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/02/23 Full Review Audience Member There just aren't very many good math based movies and this one falls into the not good bin. It is almost entirely a group of guys sitting around with big egos and yelling or threatening that there grand achievement is too dangerous. I was hoping for something of a more documentary/historical story than this crazy fictionalized mess. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 01/15/23 Full Review Audience Member Definitely nothing like I've seen before Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/17/23 Full Review Audience Member Thanks to the great acting of the actors and impressive directions, it is quite absorbing. But occasionally, an awkward way to create an atmosphere of suspension makes audiences tilt their head. For instance, the scene with Dr. Horton in the dark by himself. What's up with the triangle with an eye? The director seems to want to give some conspiracy for fun no matter what the flow of the film is? It would be great with the thrilling discussion only. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 01/30/23 Full Review Audience Member Travelling Salesman is still well worth watching though, especially for anyone with an interest in the consequences of mathematics rather than just its content. As Horton explains at a keynote conference speech, mathematicians have transformed our world, enabling mobile phones, GPS and Facebook, but also C4 explosives and enriched uranium. In A Mathematician's Apology, G. H. Hardy sought to justify the pursuit of pure mathematics, stating that it seemed unlikely there would ever be a warlike application of number theory or special relativity, but cryptography and nuclear weapons proved him wrong. Travelling Salesman's mathematicians are all too aware of what their work will do to the world, and watching them argue how to handle the consequences offers a thriller far more cerebral than most. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/25/23 Full Review Read all reviews

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