I really appreciated how you just casually and unassumingly mentioned being autistic when discussing Kazan. It really does make me feel better about myself to see it mentioned in that way.
Normalization seems very important, due to the prior stigma of autistic people and (prior?) mass culture knowledge only of severe cases, when in reality we end up seeing loads of high-functioning people and probably all the inbetweens. Hope normalization will only be progressing in the future for all (at least often occurring) neurodivergent states, personality disorders and such (I forget the general term). Really still stigmatized in many places; either you are all right and psychically healthy or you are dangerous, unreliable and broken-such bullshit, really. Especially when all kinds of “healthy” people form dysfunctional families, can’t communicate and, yes of course, are often, for example, depressed. Because even depression is often frowned upon as a thing that can happen to somebody. Esp. if they are more or less high-functioning and not keeping to the bed in darkness, silence and resignation. So, in a sense, we need to oppose. I’m glad to live at a time adult ADHD is considered possible (because I’m told it was only for little boys initially) and despite my not being diagnosed yet, at least I have a chance of treatment. (Well, if my precious country has good meds, that is. Recently I heard news that it might not. Well. It continues to please me with its nice facets, each one more humane than the other. But that’s out of scope here. I already deleted one rant from this comment and don’t want to write another in its place.) I’m glad more and more people get a chance to be treated nicely. Still so much to do but we need to hope, I guess, and act when it’s possible… if. Again the sad ending, ugh. I wanted to say that’s a good thing to do.
3:45 - it actually made sense for me she not realizing at first. if she's going for the "generic prime factorization trick" she seems to be able to do and in the heat of the moment she might tunnel vision on that for everything and not take shortcuts.
I vaguely recall (from the commentary?) that a phd student was helping the chap and came up with a smaller version that worked (10x10x10?) and the chap said "sign your name to it, submit it, and that's your phd done!"
I love this breakdown... I always wanted someone to go over the math in this movie. I'm a film person and not a mathematician so here is one thing you should keep in mind...This movie was produced on a $350k Canadian budget in 1996-97 and went on to make over $8 million at the box office and spawn multiple sequels. All the cast and crew were Canadian and, in many cases, it was their first big gig. The logistics of filming this within that budget is a story in it's own right.
I think we can forgive her for having some difficulty recognizing multiples of 2 and 5 as composite. She is under a lot of stress. I have trouble with basic math when I'm put on the spot and people's lives aren't on the line. I can't imagine doing it when the stakes are that high.
Lol...I don't know, I felt the acting was fine, the writing too, mostly, except for some details...I mean, lol...some sentences were a little amusing, but still...I thought everyone was convincing...as for the "astronomical" calculations, I don't know, lol...powers of primes...any power of a prime is easy to recognize?...I mean, memorizing a couple wouldn't make you recognize one in the millions...unless there is a bound to how large they can be, lol...maybe there was, come to think of it, I don't know how large the numbers tended to be...but if it's always easy to determine if a number is a power of a prime, I didn't know that, lol...
A bad line doesn't mean bad acting, lol...the "it's astronomical" felt a bit cheesy, perhaps, but I think the writing too was fine, for the most part, in the film...but I suppose that's subjective, lol...
3:19 Maybe the hesitance was because she was trying to prime factorize the number before giving her final verdict. The more obvious numbers of 645 & 372 have more prime factors than 649, so maybe she got distracted trying to factor those numbers even further 🤷 Either way, nice review! I'm curious what the narrative reason behind the “astronomical” misstep is [I'm sorry if I missed it in the video; I was too focused on the fact that not many prime powers exist below 1000] :) UPDATE: I just realized it was in the “savant” bit, my bad! :)
A movie I particularly like in this regard is Triangle (2009). There's not much actual maths in it, rather it's a logic puzzle. (Mild spoiler ahead.) If one pays attention one realises it's showing effectively 2/3rds of the story, and one can work out the remaining 1/3rd by the small cues and overlaps between the time lines etc. That's very satisfying to do, because it fits together like absolute clockwork, as far as I recall. They really paid attention to consistency there. It's probably not easy to do a video like this about it. But anyway, a strong movie recommendation for the kind of people who like this.
So that sequence with the 4 cubes works if you change the 4th one to be 656, 889, 462 (which makes it 17, 24,14 at the relevant time). Which is interesting, since if you look at 6:34 the middle section of that sequence of numbers isn't shown. I've not seen the movie, no idea if that being deliberate sabotage makes sense in context, but it's a possibility.
What bothers me is that all the rooms must fit together. All the shifts must find holes at their destination, which means every room that moves must have a unique destination, and that destination must be among the locations that move on this cycle. Can you come up with a list of numbers that have this property? Or can you prove that it's impossible?
I, too, was a bit disappointed by how hand-wavy the maths (and physics) of the room movement got. I didn't analyze it quite to that degree, but it did seem impossible for the complicated movement as described to work with almost no gaps ever shown between rooms. The larger canon goes to some other interesting places, but I don't think the maths ever get more rigorous. I recall an amazing amount of 'wtf?' in Hypercube, which is too bad because if ever there were an opportunity for some deeply weird maths, the breakdown of a 4-dimensional cube structure should have been it. I did like the observations about institutional horrors being built on autopilot, something that continues to feel relevant today.
Cube is such a throwback. One of my favorite horror movies so it's nice to hear people talking about it. And I totally agree with your breakdown too. I wonder what do you think of the rest of the series though?
I got to speak with the actress who played Leaven. She re-enacted the scene where she got excited about prime numbers for me. RJ
10 หลายเดือนก่อน +3
I know there may not be much mathematics in the film Pi, but it revolves around a mathematician and it would be interesting to see a deconstruction of it in case you run out of ideas, it's also quite aesthetically pleasing. Great video by the way. :)
I love that someone else gets as invested in the math, and as hung up on the inconsistencies. I've been told that I have autism as well, and I'm also bothered by the almost helpless stereotypes we're always portrayed as. Apart from that, I recall still enjoying the film when I watched (yikes, it's actually _that_ long ago).
thank you for your comments on the maths. I like the Cube as a relastic social experiement. You have all skills necessary in the group to survive, but selfness destroys the success of the group. The autistic savants survives, as he is the only non-violent character in this story. That is not how real society works, but is the silver lining of this story. edit: I am such an autist myself I didn't even was subscribed to this quality channel yet, while I like your videos about set theory a lot. Fixed that mistake and subscribed.
This video (literally the first 2 minutes of it) made me go watch Cube for the first time. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and now back to watch the rest of your take on it, thank you!! Edit: As someone who is also potentially Autistic (officially diagnosed with only ADHD but I suspect I'm on the Autistic Spectrum as well, but I currently don't feel it necessary enough to spend my money, time and energy on getting an official diagnosis), I appreciate you talking about Kazan and his character being autistic-coded, and calling out the stereotyping of autistic characters in this movie as well as in media in general.
Zed. Heh heh heh. Always makes me smile. Like the episode when Peri (American character) is reading coordinates back to the Doctor (Colin Baker) and says "zee". The Docto says "Zee? Oh...zed." I guess Time Lords are British.
9:43 i feel like a more likely way to get around the lack of a perfect match is that perhaps the rooms move differently if there is a room in the space they are trying to occupy. After all, in the row above the row you have circled, the first two rooms are in the same location, and it is probably a safe assumption that any given set of coordinates can only be occupied by one room at a time.
I wonder if Infinity Train took inspiration from this movie. It's a series of train cars that you need to solve some puzzle to get through. The train cars can move around the train and the characters have numbers on their hands that they figure are the key to escaping.
Not really about the video, but your logo/title card animation is really smooth. Using the a and f to mask the quick change from n to m and o to s is clever and looks really nice, especially because of the similar letter forms used and the speed of the animation almost tricking the brain into not even registering that two of the letters that supposedly got rearranged didn't actually appear in the first set of letters. Props to whoever designed that.
@@obnoxas Thanks! I'm a solo creator so make everything you see -- appreciates comments like this because I spend hours on small details that I question whether people notice!
I first saw Cube back in 1998 or '99 when it premiered on Sci-Fi Channel. It had always been my impression that it was a made-for-TV or straight-to-video movie, bc I don't remember it ever having been in theaters prior to being aired on television. A lot of low-budget, independent filmmakers of the '70s, '80s and '90s (especially those working in the horror and sci-fi genres) preferred this model for getting their product into the movie-consumption marketplace as it was much cheaper than using the theatrical model
I love this breakdown, it makes me want to see this movie. I really appreciate how you mentioned problems with the neurodivergent representation and the male gaze. This movie series on your channel deserves much more views
Be interested in seeing your take on the movie π. Been a while since I watched it, but from what i recall there wasn't much substantial mathematics to begin with, and what was in there, they got hilariously wrong. I'm guessing Cube handily outranks it on both axes.
Thanks. I have this film, & I agree they got a lot out of a small budget. It's almost a master class in that regard. Plus the kills are pretty rad. I wouldn't have dreamed of trying to double check the math, but I'm glad you did. tavi.
I went to watch Cube when I saw this video pop up, since I'd always meant to watch it at some point (it is freely available on TH-cam, for anyone who hasn't seen it) The "astronomical" line was so outlandish that I honestly thought I had missed something, or that Leaven was now supposed to be treating the three codes together as one 9-digit number or something I would be very interested to see if anyone has done a further breakdown of the room movement. Like, is it possible to construct coordinates in such a way that a room that moves is always replaced by another room moving into that spot? That sort of thing
I like this movie despite its flaws, but I've always just viewed the math stuff as technobabble. Interesting to learn that there's actually something to it.
I can’t believe you only have 40k subscribers. So many people are missing out. I do enjoy these light episodes, but hope it is not too much of a distraction from the meat and potatoes.
It has been a while since I have seen this movie so I can't remember all the details but one thing that I thought about when I saw the movie was that if this was a maze, the three-dimensional aspect is irrelevant, then the characters would have started at the beginning of the maze, in the starting room. The room then shifts, returning to its origin point at the end of the cycle. To escape the maze, you simply do not leave that starting room and wait until the room returns to its original position. How do you know? One of the doors will be the way out. The whole trip through the maze was pointless, and I feel that is the point of the movie.
the characters did not start in the same room, did they? however i seem to recall that by the end they do realize that the exit is right by where they started and it frustrates them ... i think i need to give it another watch though. it's been like twenty years.
Actual genuine question. If someone did, even less of a budget than this, movie based on mathematics. Like one of those "technically zero budget movies", chances of you consulting to make sure everything makes sense? That the deductions makes sense, etc? And if so, my thoughts of that would primarily be: There'd not be just mathematician buff, but ... well... several in different fields. Not that my mathematics are great, but... my first thoughts are: A Statistician Someone who primarily deals in matrices And someone who deals with advanced advanced algebra. So the second question is, if the group was completely composed of mathematicians, which specialties would be interesting to mix, that has little overlap?
To do next (or sometime): Darren Arronofsky's (sp ?) Pi. I loved it when it came out. It hasn't aged well though. It feels VERY edgy by today's standards and I'd be interested to see what you think of the maths presented.
TO be fair, the protagonist was correct when she said it would be implausible for her to be able to perfectly factorise any number. Like, RSA effectively works because of how hard it it to find factors of two - very large - primes. (Yes, the scope is wildly different, the numbers used in RSA are so large that they have as many digits as the values of the ones in the cube, but also the protagonist is a human - not a computer). However, the real crime was using a multiple of 3... Like it would've been so easy to use something like 5767. If you want, try to factor that in your head!
@@yonatanbeer3475 I know, but computers are millions of times faster than people. As I said, the scope is wildly different, but the problem itself isn't an easy one was the point I was making.
I think 25 years ago, autism was understood quite differently than it is today. The character in this movie would be described as "high-functioning." Autism wasn't really seen as a spectrum, and Asperger Syndrome was seen as a separate disease. So while it is unfortunate that autistic people were uniformly represented this way in media, it's not surprising, since that reflected the most up-to-date medical science of the time.
I seem to recall, that Kazan had his brain "melted" in Cube zero, at least according to events in that prequel. (I don't want to spoil it, in case anyone hasn't seen that one. But I might be wrong) So he might not be a "real" autistic person.
I would be interested in whether there is mathematics which can help win the game battleships given there is a limited grid size and specific size and number of boats
I definitely preferred Cube to A beautiful mind though that's mostly because inaccuracies in movies that pretend to be real stories really upset me (I really hated Imitation Game for that).
Yes. That's it. Does the way that signal was constructed, make any sense mathematically? I have seen a few computer animated reconstructions of the built "wormhole machine" on youtube but never any theory on the way they analized and decoded that signal. Just a thought that this would be interesting to you after watching the golay code and movie maths videos.
Can confirm about the autism, I have it and I could never do anything he is shown to be able to do. I can often grasp complex mathematical concepts and my ability to visualise is pretty good but I couldn't factor numbers in my head if my life depended on it haha
Great analysis. I was born in Canada and consider this the only good Canadian film. As to a rating, the whole movie feels like it could have been one notch better. Maybe some producers stepped in and said "That's it, ship it."
Having said that the prequel film gives an explaination for Kazan also ( which i found a little disappointing) . Another possibility for the apparent lack of mathematical ability could be a reaction to the antagonist, so it could either be a mental block or something a bit more deliberate. The book Sphere and the film version by Mcheal Crichton is interesting. Personally i have a liking to the film x+y
I worked this out off the top of my head while preoccupied with something else: the closest square is 576, which is 24^2, so 24 is the highest we need to check. It's not divisible by 2 or 5, but 5+6+7=18 which is a multiple of 9, so it's divisible by 9, so definitely not a prime or a power of a prime. If it were 567 _digits,_ that would be astronomical. I love this movie.
243 is divisible by 9 and is 3⁵, but luckily 567 is also a multiple of 7 due to 56 being 8×7. So, despite your implied claim of “All multiples of 9 are safe” being wrong, your final conclusion of 567 being safe is correct! :)
@@notoriouswhitemoth Ohh, I thought that the part saying “it's divisible by 9, so definitely not a prime or a power of a prime” implied that claim. I may have gotten confused. My bad :)
I read an interpretation of the film once that the characters represent aspects of the human brain - the movie whittling away to see what makes us human The real mystery being consciousness itself and why do we even exist
other stuff you could cover: the body swap episode of Futurama; Proof; 21; Moneyball, the Stoppard play Arcadia, and the most egregious: random episodes of Numb3rs. there's a scene where a suspect is ID'd because they do "a style of math taught at Harvard" and vaguely mention something about Harvard's Math 55 course. drives me nuts every time I think about it
@@funktorial Most of those are on my list of potential episodes, but I've never seen Numb3rs and I've had a few comments about that so maybe I'll check out some of the most standout episodes!
cube zero explains the 'savant;' I would have to spoil the movie to explain it, but suffice it to say it explains why he can do the math and what he knows. I posted this before I watched, so I don't know if this comes up.
There’s another unfortunate aspect of Kazan that isn’t in the original cube but is revealed in cube 0 the prequel to cube, the end of that movie shows the protagonist being inflicted with Kazan’s condition medically by the administrators of the cube so he is LITERALLY made autistic… also cube 2 was just bad don’t watch it
spoiler in the awful (and potentially non canonical) prequel Cube Zero, they make allusion that Kazan/Wynn is involved in the monitoring of the Cube and was lobotomised. It's really crass.
Just watched Cube on your recommendation and it was fantastic! Thanks! Also I disagree: I think the acting was great. A darn sight better than half the films released today.
I've been a long time fan of the movie. I agree with almost everything you've said but I think the acting and writing get a partial pass because the idea is so good. The good parts, for me anyway, outweigh the bad bits. And it may have influenced movies like Saw but Cube isn't just torture porn.
Agreed -- a good concept goes a long way and the cheesy acting is part of its charm! I only mention Saw (i.e. the first Saw) in this video which I wouldn't brand as torture porn (though the sequels stray into that territory for sure). Thanks for watching!
It might be a bit painful, but you should do Pi. it's been a very long time since I've seen it, but I recall the movie being generally decent, and the math being really really awful.
Looks like someone had a good idea, but failed to get funding for it, so the end result was a mediocre film. Too bad, because the premise is not bad. Good analysis. I would have put it slightly further down and left.
The far shorter shorts than men is actually less to do with sexism, rather that... well... men have that "junk", so tight fitting is often more ... well... comfortable. So my guess is frankly that it was just a comfort question, not sexiness or sexism.
![The biggest hand calculation in a century! [Pi Day 2024]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LIg-6glbLkU/mqdefault.jpg)
![เปิดบ้าน พี่ตูน Bodyslam หลังใหม่คนแรก ที่ภูเก็ต l [Nickynachat]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/flFwcmyDQSk/mqdefault.jpg)
I really appreciated how you just casually and unassumingly mentioned being autistic when discussing Kazan. It really does make me feel better about myself to see it mentioned in that way.
I mentioned it in my mental health video too -- I think normalisation is really important :)
@@AnotherRoof Ah! Haven’t watched that one- might have to. And, yeah, I completely agree.
Renormalization is also important
@@1.4142 funny
Normalization seems very important, due to the prior stigma of autistic people and (prior?) mass culture knowledge only of severe cases, when in reality we end up seeing loads of high-functioning people and probably all the inbetweens.
Hope normalization will only be progressing in the future for all (at least often occurring) neurodivergent states, personality disorders and such (I forget the general term). Really still stigmatized in many places; either you are all right and psychically healthy or you are dangerous, unreliable and broken-such bullshit, really. Especially when all kinds of “healthy” people form dysfunctional families, can’t communicate and, yes of course, are often, for example, depressed. Because even depression is often frowned upon as a thing that can happen to somebody. Esp. if they are more or less high-functioning and not keeping to the bed in darkness, silence and resignation.
So, in a sense, we need to oppose. I’m glad to live at a time adult ADHD is considered possible (because I’m told it was only for little boys initially) and despite my not being diagnosed yet, at least I have a chance of treatment. (Well, if my precious country has good meds, that is. Recently I heard news that it might not. Well. It continues to please me with its nice facets, each one more humane than the other. But that’s out of scope here. I already deleted one rant from this comment and don’t want to write another in its place.) I’m glad more and more people get a chance to be treated nicely. Still so much to do but we need to hope, I guess, and act when it’s possible… if. Again the sad ending, ugh. I wanted to say that’s a good thing to do.
3:45 - it actually made sense for me she not realizing at first. if she's going for the "generic prime factorization trick" she seems to be able to do and in the heat of the moment she might tunnel vision on that for everything and not take shortcuts.
I vaguely recall (from the commentary?) that a phd student was helping the chap and came up with a smaller version that worked (10x10x10?) and the chap said "sign your name to it, submit it, and that's your phd done!"
I love this breakdown... I always wanted someone to go over the math in this movie.
I'm a film person and not a mathematician so here is one thing you should keep in mind...This movie was produced on a $350k Canadian budget in 1996-97 and went on to make over $8 million at the box office and spawn multiple sequels. All the cast and crew were Canadian and, in many cases, it was their first big gig. The logistics of filming this within that budget is a story in it's own right.
I think we can forgive her for having some difficulty recognizing multiples of 2 and 5 as composite. She is under a lot of stress. I have trouble with basic math when I'm put on the spot and people's lives aren't on the line. I can't imagine doing it when the stakes are that high.
Yeah but she does plenty of harder math correctly too. It's barely recognition---as a math student she should be unable *not* to see that 462 is even.
Lol...I don't know, I felt the acting was fine, the writing too, mostly, except for some details...I mean, lol...some sentences were a little amusing, but still...I thought everyone was convincing...as for the "astronomical" calculations, I don't know, lol...powers of primes...any power of a prime is easy to recognize?...I mean, memorizing a couple wouldn't make you recognize one in the millions...unless there is a bound to how large they can be, lol...maybe there was, come to think of it, I don't know how large the numbers tended to be...but if it's always easy to determine if a number is a power of a prime, I didn't know that, lol...
Lol...she doesn't seem too nervous to do some of the other calculations...I do think that's a mistake there, they shoul have made it easier for her...
A bad line doesn't mean bad acting, lol...the "it's astronomical" felt a bit cheesy, perhaps, but I think the writing too was fine, for the most part, in the film...but I suppose that's subjective, lol...
Lol...exactly...
This was awesome. I appreciate that this is a “accuracy of X in movie” video without making it like cinema sins. Awesome work
3:19 Maybe the hesitance was because she was trying to prime factorize the number before giving her final verdict. The more obvious numbers of 645 & 372 have more prime factors than 649, so maybe she got distracted trying to factor those numbers even further 🤷
Either way, nice review! I'm curious what the narrative reason behind the “astronomical” misstep is [I'm sorry if I missed it in the video; I was too focused on the fact that not many prime powers exist below 1000] :)
UPDATE: I just realized it was in the “savant” bit, my bad! :)
A movie I particularly like in this regard is Triangle (2009). There's not much actual maths in it, rather it's a logic puzzle. (Mild spoiler ahead.) If one pays attention one realises it's showing effectively 2/3rds of the story, and one can work out the remaining 1/3rd by the small cues and overlaps between the time lines etc. That's very satisfying to do, because it fits together like absolute clockwork, as far as I recall. They really paid attention to consistency there.
It's probably not easy to do a video like this about it. But anyway, a strong movie recommendation for the kind of people who like this.
So that sequence with the 4 cubes works if you change the 4th one to be 656, 889, 462 (which makes it 17, 24,14 at the relevant time). Which is interesting, since if you look at 6:34 the middle section of that sequence of numbers isn't shown.
I've not seen the movie, no idea if that being deliberate sabotage makes sense in context, but it's a possibility.
What bothers me is that all the rooms must fit together. All the shifts must find holes at their destination, which means every room that moves must have a unique destination, and that destination must be among the locations that move on this cycle.
Can you come up with a list of numbers that have this property? Or can you prove that it's impossible?
I, too, was a bit disappointed by how hand-wavy the maths (and physics) of the room movement got. I didn't analyze it quite to that degree, but it did seem impossible for the complicated movement as described to work with almost no gaps ever shown between rooms.
The larger canon goes to some other interesting places, but I don't think the maths ever get more rigorous. I recall an amazing amount of 'wtf?' in Hypercube, which is too bad because if ever there were an opportunity for some deeply weird maths, the breakdown of a 4-dimensional cube structure should have been it. I did like the observations about institutional horrors being built on autopilot, something that continues to feel relevant today.
Yes... But more to the point, Leaven is Ezri Dax from Deep Space Nine
The other 2 films in the trilogy actually form a very neat package
Cube is such a throwback. One of my favorite horror movies so it's nice to hear people talking about it. And I totally agree with your breakdown too. I wonder what do you think of the rest of the series though?
Loved this review! One of my favourite films despite the little flaws as you mention.
wait......??? how did you get early access?
@@aashsyed1277 Patrons get early access to my videos :)
@@AnotherRoofBtw, you noticed the "newer" feature of letting people trial Patron Tiers?
I got to speak with the actress who played Leaven. She re-enacted the scene where she got excited about prime numbers for me.
RJ
I know there may not be much mathematics in the film Pi, but it revolves around a mathematician and it would be interesting to see a deconstruction of it in case you run out of ideas, it's also quite aesthetically pleasing. Great video by the way. :)
I love that someone else gets as invested in the math, and as hung up on the inconsistencies.
I've been told that I have autism as well, and I'm also bothered by the almost helpless stereotypes we're always portrayed as.
Apart from that, I recall still enjoying the film when I watched (yikes, it's actually _that_ long ago).
thank you for your comments on the maths. I like the Cube as a relastic social experiement. You have all skills necessary in the group to survive, but selfness destroys the success of the group. The autistic savants survives, as he is the only non-violent character in this story. That is not how real society works, but is the silver lining of this story.
edit: I am such an autist myself I didn't even was subscribed to this quality channel yet, while I like your videos about set theory a lot. Fixed that mistake and subscribed.
This video (literally the first 2 minutes of it) made me go watch Cube for the first time. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and now back to watch the rest of your take on it, thank you!!
Edit: As someone who is also potentially Autistic (officially diagnosed with only ADHD but I suspect I'm on the Autistic Spectrum as well, but I currently don't feel it necessary enough to spend my money, time and energy on getting an official diagnosis), I appreciate you talking about Kazan and his character being autistic-coded, and calling out the stereotyping of autistic characters in this movie as well as in media in general.
Zed. Heh heh heh. Always makes me smile. Like the episode when Peri (American character) is reading coordinates back to the Doctor (Colin Baker) and says "zee". The Docto says "Zee? Oh...zed." I guess Time Lords are British.
9:43 i feel like a more likely way to get around the lack of a perfect match is that perhaps the rooms move differently if there is a room in the space they are trying to occupy. After all, in the row above the row you have circled, the first two rooms are in the same location, and it is probably a safe assumption that any given set of coordinates can only be occupied by one room at a time.
I wonder if Infinity Train took inspiration from this movie. It's a series of train cars that you need to solve some puzzle to get through. The train cars can move around the train and the characters have numbers on their hands that they figure are the key to escaping.
Not really about the video, but your logo/title card animation is really smooth. Using the a and f to mask the quick change from n to m and o to s is clever and looks really nice, especially because of the similar letter forms used and the speed of the animation almost tricking the brain into not even registering that two of the letters that supposedly got rearranged didn't actually appear in the first set of letters. Props to whoever designed that.
@@obnoxas Thanks! I'm a solo creator so make everything you see -- appreciates comments like this because I spend hours on small details that I question whether people notice!
Love your channel dude. You deserve to be up there with Numberphile and 3b1b, just keep making content and I think it will happen!
I first saw Cube back in 1998 or '99 when it premiered on Sci-Fi Channel. It had always been my impression that it was a made-for-TV or straight-to-video movie, bc I don't remember it ever having been in theaters prior to being aired on television. A lot of low-budget, independent filmmakers of the '70s, '80s and '90s (especially those working in the horror and sci-fi genres) preferred this model for getting their product into the movie-consumption marketplace as it was much cheaper than using the theatrical model
Film Suggestion: Contact
One of my fave films. Really enjoyed this take on it
I love this breakdown, it makes me want to see this movie. I really appreciate how you mentioned problems with the neurodivergent representation and the male gaze. This movie series on your channel deserves much more views
I didn't realize from the title that you were referencing this movie. I love this movie!!
Be interested in seeing your take on the movie π. Been a while since I watched it, but from what i recall there wasn't much substantial mathematics to begin with, and what was in there, they got hilariously wrong. I'm guessing Cube handily outranks it on both axes.
It's on the list! I'm a huge Aronofsky fan :)
Love the idea of this video. I also love the whole trilogy of films, I'm a sucker for B tier movies and maths.
Thanks. I have this film, & I agree they got a lot out of a small budget. It's almost a master class in that regard. Plus the kills are pretty rad. I wouldn't have dreamed of trying to double check the math, but I'm glad you did. tavi.
That astronomical scene, my goodness...
anyways i love everything you do in this other roof!
I'm starting to really like this series. Can't wait for the next video! 😊
That's an excellent breakdown, thank you, I always wondered how far they actually went with the maths!
I suggested this film in your previous movie related video so whether or not you saw my comment I'm very happy! ^^
I went to watch Cube when I saw this video pop up, since I'd always meant to watch it at some point (it is freely available on TH-cam, for anyone who hasn't seen it)
The "astronomical" line was so outlandish that I honestly thought I had missed something, or that Leaven was now supposed to be treating the three codes together as one 9-digit number or something
I would be very interested to see if anyone has done a further breakdown of the room movement. Like, is it possible to construct coordinates in such a way that a room that moves is always replaced by another room moving into that spot? That sort of thing
13:10 shout out to Cube 2 and Cube 3 which discuss how thecube came to be built, used, and maintained
I like this movie despite its flaws, but I've always just viewed the math stuff as technobabble. Interesting to learn that there's actually something to it.
This Video was really fun.
Fun fact: Nicole de Boer was also in an episode of Stargate: Atlantis
Bravo! Cube is a great movie, really one of the best in the genre!
I can’t believe you only have 40k subscribers. So many people are missing out. I do enjoy these light episodes, but hope it is not too much of a distraction from the meat and potatoes.
MAFS has returned!
It has been a while since I have seen this movie so I can't remember all the details but one thing that I thought about when I saw the movie was that if this was a maze, the three-dimensional aspect is irrelevant, then the characters would have started at the beginning of the maze, in the starting room. The room then shifts, returning to its origin point at the end of the cycle. To escape the maze, you simply do not leave that starting room and wait until the room returns to its original position. How do you know? One of the doors will be the way out. The whole trip through the maze was pointless, and I feel that is the point of the movie.
the characters did not start in the same room, did they?
however i seem to recall that by the end they do realize that the exit is right by where they started and it frustrates them
... i think i need to give it another watch though. it's been like twenty years.
@@mystic839 Yeah, it has been a while. It seems like they were all together at the start but I could be misremembering.
Actual genuine question.
If someone did, even less of a budget than this, movie based on mathematics. Like one of those "technically zero budget movies", chances of you consulting to make sure everything makes sense? That the deductions makes sense, etc?
And if so, my thoughts of that would primarily be:
There'd not be just mathematician buff, but ... well... several in different fields. Not that my mathematics are great, but... my first thoughts are:
A Statistician
Someone who primarily deals in matrices
And someone who deals with advanced advanced algebra.
So the second question is, if the group was completely composed of mathematicians, which specialties would be interesting to mix, that has little overlap?
To do next (or sometime): Darren Arronofsky's (sp ?) Pi. I loved it when it came out. It hasn't aged well though. It feels VERY edgy by today's standards and I'd be interested to see what you think of the maths presented.
TO be fair, the protagonist was correct when she said it would be implausible for her to be able to perfectly factorise any number. Like, RSA effectively works because of how hard it it to find factors of two - very large - primes.
(Yes, the scope is wildly different, the numbers used in RSA are so large that they have as many digits as the values of the ones in the cube, but also the protagonist is a human - not a computer). However, the real crime was using a multiple of 3... Like it would've been so easy to use something like 5767. If you want, try to factor that in your head!
RSA uses numbers hundreds of digits long
@@yonatanbeer3475 I know, but computers are millions of times faster than people. As I said, the scope is wildly different, but the problem itself isn't an easy one was the point I was making.
my only complaint is that i didn't hear a mention of "Cube 2: Hypercube" which i somehow watched before the original
Thanks for watching! I enjoyed that one as a teen but I dread to think of how poorly it holds up -- the original at least has its charms!
I hope you saw the DVD with director commentary. It was very interesting.
I think 25 years ago, autism was understood quite differently than it is today. The character in this movie would be described as "high-functioning." Autism wasn't really seen as a spectrum, and Asperger Syndrome was seen as a separate disease. So while it is unfortunate that autistic people were uniformly represented this way in media, it's not surprising, since that reflected the most up-to-date medical science of the time.
A math student in a 3D grid would immediately see 3 numbers and think "coordinates" but it took her way too long to figure that out
I seem to recall, that Kazan had his brain "melted" in Cube zero, at least according to events in that prequel. (I don't want to spoil it, in case anyone hasn't seen that one. But I might be wrong) So he might not be a "real" autistic person.
Cool analysis. I actually wish you would do this without concern for spoilers. The movies are so old anyway.
I would be interested in whether there is mathematics which can help win the game battleships given there is a limited grid size and specific size and number of boats
Next movies: "Good Will Hunting" or "The an who knew infinity".
That antagonist that trapped them could have instead derived factors of Euler products at the primes, powers of primes, and composites of primes.
wikipedia says the budget is $350,000 CAD. what does CAD mean?
Canadian Dollars.
I definitely preferred Cube to A beautiful mind though that's mostly because inaccuracies in movies that pretend to be real stories really upset me (I really hated Imitation Game for that).
im surprised the actor or anyone on set didnt say anything about the maths girl having to think about whether a number ending in 2 is prime
What is the movie where Hadden explains to Arroway how to put the blueprint for the alien machine together???
Contact?
Yes. That's it. Does the way that signal was constructed, make any sense mathematically? I have seen a few computer animated reconstructions of the built "wormhole machine" on youtube but never any theory on the way they analized and decoded that signal. Just a thought that this would be interesting to you after watching the golay code and movie maths videos.
Can confirm about the autism, I have it and I could never do anything he is shown to be able to do. I can often grasp complex mathematical concepts and my ability to visualise is pretty good but I couldn't factor numbers in my head if my life depended on it haha
Great analysis. I was born in Canada and consider this the only good Canadian film.
As to a rating, the whole movie feels like it could have been one notch better. Maybe some producers stepped in and said "That's it, ship it."
"IT'S ASTRONOMICAL!"
did you watch the other cube movies and notice there's a videogame?
i like the movie. i'm fine with the math-babble being inaccurate. no other complaints.
Such a brilliant yet awful yet brilliant film
Having said that the prequel film gives an explaination for Kazan also ( which i found a little disappointing) . Another possibility for the apparent lack of mathematical ability could be a reaction to the antagonist, so it could either be a mental block or something a bit more deliberate. The book Sphere and the film version by Mcheal Crichton is interesting. Personally i have a liking to the film x+y
I worked this out off the top of my head while preoccupied with something else: the closest square is 576, which is 24^2, so 24 is the highest we need to check. It's not divisible by 2 or 5, but 5+6+7=18 which is a multiple of 9, so it's divisible by 9, so definitely not a prime or a power of a prime.
If it were 567 _digits,_ that would be astronomical.
I love this movie.
243 is divisible by 9 and is 3⁵, but luckily 567 is also a multiple of 7 due to 56 being 8×7. So, despite your implied claim of “All multiples of 9 are safe” being wrong, your final conclusion of 567 being safe is correct! :)
@@MathNerd1729 I don't think I said all multiples of 9 are safe, did I?
@@notoriouswhitemoth Ohh, I thought that the part saying “it's divisible by 9, so definitely not a prime or a power of a prime” implied that claim. I may have gotten confused. My bad :)
I read an interpretation of the film once that the characters represent aspects of the human brain - the movie whittling away to see what makes us human
The real mystery being consciousness itself and why do we even exist
Cube is one of my favorite movies, the sequel and prequelsequel aren't as good, but still enjoyable.
lol MAFS Series great !! love it
Man I wish I also got savant with my autism. The maximum I can do is to learn very fast and not forget things that are in my hyperfocus.
So I did see this movie and yea the math wonky
other stuff you could cover: the body swap episode of Futurama; Proof; 21; Moneyball, the Stoppard play Arcadia, and the most egregious: random episodes of Numb3rs. there's a scene where a suspect is ID'd because they do "a style of math taught at Harvard" and vaguely mention something about Harvard's Math 55 course. drives me nuts every time I think about it
oh and the scene in Avengers Endgame where Tony Stark figures out time travel by finding some eigenvalues lol
@@funktorial Most of those are on my list of potential episodes, but I've never seen Numb3rs and I've had a few comments about that so maybe I'll check out some of the most standout episodes!
Maybe she meant 'powers of prime mod (1000)' ?
how are we supposed to transcibe formal alex' words
cube zero explains the 'savant;' I would have to spoil the movie to explain it, but suffice it to say it explains why he can do the math and what he knows. I posted this before I watched, so I don't know if this comes up.
I didn't hear any reference to the other Cube movies (3 or 4) which end up explaining the why and how.
Bruh is he telling me he could easily calculate and memroize powers of numbers such as 31² wtf
also i am able to comment before the live starts !
There’s another unfortunate aspect of Kazan that isn’t in the original cube but is revealed in cube 0 the prequel to cube, the end of that movie shows the protagonist being inflicted with Kazan’s condition medically by the administrators of the cube so he is LITERALLY made autistic… also cube 2 was just bad don’t watch it
Can you do the movie Fermat’s Room from 2007?
The next logical step is to review Sphere. Then go back the other direction and review $20,000 Pyramid
Will you rate the sequel Cube 2: Hypercube?
spoiler
in the awful (and potentially non canonical) prequel Cube Zero, they make allusion that Kazan/Wynn is involved in the monitoring of the Cube and was lobotomised. It's really crass.
Just watched Cube on your recommendation and it was fantastic! Thanks! Also I disagree: I think the acting was great. A darn sight better than half the films released today.
Thanks for watching and I'm glad you enjoyed the film! Clearly we watch different films 😅
😂
I've been a long time fan of the movie. I agree with almost everything you've said but I think the acting and writing get a partial pass because the idea is so good. The good parts, for me anyway, outweigh the bad bits. And it may have influenced movies like Saw but Cube isn't just torture porn.
Agreed -- a good concept goes a long way and the cheesy acting is part of its charm!
I only mention Saw (i.e. the first Saw) in this video which I wouldn't brand as torture porn (though the sequels stray into that territory for sure).
Thanks for watching!
Perhaps the intent was as described, but the film makers got their maths wrong!
It might be a bit painful, but you should do Pi. it's been a very long time since I've seen it, but I recall the movie being generally decent, and the math being really really awful.
One of my favourite films of all time. Thanks for ruining it. And I really mean it! You’re the only person acceptable to ruin a movie. Thanks!
❤❤❤
14:00 Bruh, its sexism to have different underwear?
Fun fact: Kazan isn't autistic, he has brain damage. I won't spoil why... go watch all three movies
tfw the current ranking forms a linear trend
0,000 views.
Looks like someone had a good idea, but failed to get funding for it, so the end result was a mediocre film. Too bad, because the premise is not bad.
Good analysis. I would have put it slightly further down and left.
The far shorter shorts than men is actually less to do with sexism, rather that... well... men have that "junk", so tight fitting is often more ... well... comfortable.
So my guess is frankly that it was just a comfort question, not sexiness or sexism.
How about the movie Pi from Requium for a Dream director Darren Aronofsky