The Matrix

[Jeunemaitre]

personal anecdote
My wife and I were driving home from seeing the film and she said to me "how did that guy make copies of himself?" I responded that he did it the same way you copy text out of one Word document and into another (mimicking the ctrl-c—ctrl-v motion). And she said "but it was a person, not a Word document. We ended up in a discussion about the fundamental principle of the divided world presented in the matrix and how the persona representing Smith really was a computer program that presented itself in the shape of a person. Like a virus, he copied himself onto other systems (when he "infected" the individual on the other ship [insert tangent]) when taking peoples bodies, and could just as easily zip out to some other system in the instant before the system is destroyed (person is killed). There was a good long silence while we each worked out what to say next. She won by stating "who was that guy at the end, the one in the white suit?" Not wanting to full repeat everything, I answered shortly "he wasn't a guy, he was a computer program too." She said "oh well, I still liked his suit..."

tangent: we had an intermediary discussion about the ability of active viruses to write themselves onto remote computers over active connections, and I still think it's perfectly plausible that Smith overwrote the hard drive (brain) of the infected system, and now operates that system despite the fact that it's offline at the moment. Controlling the frame of the body is roughly analogous to inhabiting systems still online (people in the matrix).

previous discussions/
As to the existence of the Matrix, let’s assume that the energy produced by humans is used as a source of energy. If this is true, the machines would want to maximize the individual output. An active body generates more heat than an inactive body, so if Morpheus was right when he said that "you mind makes [the Matrix] real" then neuro-simulated stimulation will result in more heat produced. The question is, is the per person amount of energy it takes to run the matrix less than the per person amount of energy produced? (when figuring this ratio, keep in mind all the "energy costs" that go into matrix maintenance and maintaining all of the machine world, also bear in mind that the matrix actually has no graphic representation unto itself, all the graphics are generated on the client side (within the plugged in human's mind))

McLaughlin voice/"Next issue: the rusty latch. Coincidence or contrivance? I ask you Jeunemaitre..."/close McLaughlin voice
Maybe the rusty support was just a coincidence, that ships connection would have been severed either way (by the sentinels bomb, or by an emp used to defend the ship (it would shut down the ship as well, right?))

new question/
Lastly, and the question of most interest to me [lets put our math caps on folks]...
If in a prior iteration of the Matrix, the "architect" arrived at an equation with irreconcilable infinities, is the institution of a larger framing equation [the machine seeded and planned One (Neo, in this iteration)] really a mathematically adequate (or possible) programming solution? I'm guessing that the infinities result from stack dumps of choices faced by the wired humans in which the selected outcome is an option with a probability approaching 1 in [lazy 8]. If this is so, then would a sufficient solution be to sum those error terms, assign them all to one variable, then take your chances with whether that variable will generate a fault in the code (the One reaches the source code)? If the fault occurs, then the variable reassigns the target error terms, the system is reset, and the program runs from the beginning again?

I guess I just don't know enough higher abstract math (or maybe not enough programming) to approach this question. Anybody have any thoughts?