Monday, June 4, 2018

The Millennium Falcon has three droid brains in its computer and the idea came from Lewis Carroll.

By now, most of you have probably seen Solo: A Star Wars story. If not, you are all at least probably interested in Han Solo and know some background on the Millennium Falcon. So I feel like I can discuss what happened in the movie (spoiler alert) to some degree without leaving a bunch of you behind in all the geekery.

In the movie L3-37, the droid abolutionist and intimate companion of Lando Calrissian (Lando is pan-sexual) had it/her mind uploaded into the Falcon to take advantage of one of the most complete maps of the universe so that they could escape the Kessel Mines (a point that has been bantered in casual conversation in Star Wars canon for decades). So when C-3PO talks about the Falcon's dialect in the original trilogy, it's probably L3-37 that Threepio is talking to (and this has been pretty much confirmed by the internet).

What I didn't know is this next part, which is something I discovered with a little research elbow greese. R2-D2's internal monologue in the Last Jedi novelization says that the Falcon has three droid brains in its main computer, and this "tidbit" was part of the original canon before Disney took over everything. Furthermore, this "three brains" thing in a computer can be traced back to Lewis Carroll, who was a mathematician and logician and who would have probably programmed computers if they had been available in his era.

The idea behind three sentient processors is that if they disagreed upon an answer, two of them could "outvote" a faulty one, whereas dual processors would simply deadlock and a single processor could possibly hand you the incorrect answer.

It makes me wonder if there's going to be a movie where droids rise up against their slave masters, and they are led by a sentient Millennium Falcon. I wonder if Stephen King would sue for stealing his idea?

4 comments:

  1. Three to avoid deadlock makes sense. I still didn't get the impression of intimate with the robot though.

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  2. A sentient Falcon would be hilarious.

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  3. That part really bothered me. L3-37 (really?) fights for sentient rights and leads a droid revolt only to end up inserted into the Millennium Falcon. I don't remember hearing her at any part after that and I'm pretty sure it's because we don't hear her in the original trilogy. Without the need to fit into the original trilogy, L3-37 could have been like Jarvis was/is for Iron Man and that would have pretty cool. As it was, it felt tragic to me. After that scene I kept thinking about the Millennium Falcon from the beginning of A Force Awakens. Better to die than end up a mute prisoner and tossed in a trash heap.

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  4. That's a Terry Prachett line, although he used it for witches. You need three witches to make a coven. Two witches make an argument.

    Lewis Carroll has wigged me out ever since seeing the Great Books episode about Alice in Wonderland. (It's on YouTube, in case you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8Vz5MRMfDU&t=7s)

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