Today I came across the Quora question If I just proved that P = NP, how do I start taking over the world? One of the answers mentioned the 2012 film Travelling Salesman, a cerebral thriller which explores some possible ramifications of being able to solve all NP problems in polynomial time. The trailer is below.
I had seen the trailer back when the movie was first released but never ended up seeing the movie. If I recall correctly I expected it to be corny, inaccurate, or both. After watching the trailer again I headed to its IMDB page to see how it was received. I wasn’t surprised to see a “weighted average” rating of 5.6 (IMDB uses a weighting system to prevent vote stuffing). However, the user reviews were overwhelmingly positive. Curious, I checked the histogram of user ratings for the movie.
Usually, the ratings of movies that are neither exceptionally highly nor exceptionally poorly rated have distributions that are roughly a truncated bell shape with small bumps at “1” and “10”, the minimum and maximum scores. A pair of examples are shown below.
It’s generally accepted that people who have strong opinions (e.g. “1” or “10”) are more likely to rate and review, but the unusual relative size of the bumps in the distribution for Travelling Salesman make me wonder if there’s something else going on, perhaps a somewhat unique audience that has been particularly polarized by some aspect of the film. A less interesting explanation is that the groups of people who rate exceptionally high or low do so early, and as more people rate the movie, the relative size of the bumps decreases. Either way, I’m intrigued enough to watch the film sometime soon. Tonight, though, my fiancée and I have the second episode of a two-part Deep Space 9 sequence whose first episode turned out to be a cliff-hanger.
Update (October 26, 2014): We watched the movie last night, and I’m feeling more confident about the polarizing aspect hypothesis. While the mathematics were a central plot point, the movie turned out to be more about power and responsibility immediately after a proof that P=NP was found. On top of that, the movie consists almost entirely of an argument in a conference room. So, I suspect that the audience who enjoy philosophical discussions of power and politics would have enjoyed the film, the audience that was expecting either (a) math or (b) actual depiction of consequences would be disappointed. Absurdly, I was most disappointed that the details of the proof itself were never discussed.
Sampler 