What a Programmer Sees When He Watches Inception

Inception also understands "Big Oh" ideas -- when you are looping inside the third level down, you have 10 seconds on the outside giving you 10^3 seconds on the inside. (EDIT: a single "tick" in one level allows for 20 or so "ticks" at the next level of dreaming, because of extra brain capacity during sleep.)<p>Hehe -- I loved the movie...

I found the movie didn't make a whole lot of sense at times. It felt like the writer cut a lot of corners when it came to the whole logical coherency of the plot. Maybe if we blow something up they won't notice!<p>The plot was entertaining and a good idea, but it left a lot to be desired. It's not destined to become a classic like: Fight Club, 12 Monkeys, Requiem for a Dream, Primer. If you enjoyed Inception, do yourself a favor and check those out if you haven't seen them.

Furthermore, ... I thought it was interesting the movie only went down 4 levels. I have a rule of thumb when working on hierarchical structures (like a directory tree holding lots of data) that three levels of hierarchy is all a person can hold in their head at a time. This is sort of the like the 7 items +/- 2, except I think that the seven items rule only applies "across" a structure. To understand more than three levels deep requires supplementary structures like indexing, sorting, or nesting ...<p>(of nesting (of nesting (...)))

Entering Limbo = Memory Leak. The reference to an object is nullified (the subject's projection/reference is killed in the dream), so the object is leaked and there is no way to access it, until either a garbage collection happens, or when the parent process is stopped. (i.e. the subject is awaken up).

What I thought:<p>* These dreams are far too cohesive and realistic. Dreams aren't like The Matrix where physics is normal and you do something to it. They're more like weird shit happens <i>and you accept it as normal</i>.<p>* Dreaming nested 3 levels of recursion deep? Done it, didn't need a sedative.

Anybody else think of the book Godel Escher Bach when they were watching this movie? Beautiful how the movie wraps in on itself like a mobius strip.

Can someone explain why the zero g scenes didn't cascade down through each dream level? They were feeling forces in the first dream in the van and those would go to the hotel but those sleeping there would not feel the same forces (eg lack of gravity) the next level down.<p>I did really love the idea behind the totem though, very clever.

What a computer scientist sees is an infinite tower of reflective interpreters.

'Inception' was a classic example of recursion.

if(depth &#62; 3) return false; else {<p><pre><code> try { // ... do what the OP wrote } catch (DeathException D) { enterLimboState() ... } }</code></pre>

What if <i>she</i> watches it?