Saturday, December 25, 2010

More about GEB

GEB is really a fantastic book. And I believe that the movie "Inception" should have borrowed many concepts and inspirations from it.

For instance, in the movie, they just pushed themselves into recursively constructed dreams in order to do the inception. Then in the book, tortoise and Achilles went into recursively constructed drawings by Escher. In the movie, they used ticks to pop out of the deeper dreams. And in the book, they used tonic or popcorns to jump into the higher level.

But what's more, the book contains some interesting concepts that the movie didn't mention. One is the corrupt of the system. When a Genie asked Achilles to say his three wishes. Achilles just say one wish: "I wish my wish would not be granted!" How clever! It is a paradox, which resulted in the corrupt of the system. And after the system recovered, they were standing in another drawing, with lizards and their tonic remaining. So the author explained the concept of recovery of recursion in a fairly clever way!

Once started reading, can't I stop. What a brilliant book!

No comments:

Post a Comment