MovieChat Forums > National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007) Discussion > Why would Riley type the passwords by ha...

Why would Riley type the passwords by hand?

posted 15 years ago by superstringy
10 replies | jump to latest

There's a scene where Riley is trying to find the correct 5-letter cypher key using some fancy computer hacker program. And they show him manual typing in each 5-letter word into the program individually.

If he's such a computer genius, why doesn't he just write the 15 lines of code you'd need to search through an e-dictionary for five letter words and substitute them in to the cypher cracker program? It would be ridiculously simple. I find it hard to believe he wouldn't have thought of this, being he plays such a "brilliant" character.

ANagah.

[–] Danily 15 years ago

Because Disney thinks typing by hand makes them look like they're working harder? Who knows.

[–] FearNotMan 14 years ago

He didn't have a good internet connection to download an e-dictionary, obviously.

[–] Metal_BioHazard 14 years ago

As far as the story would go, yeah that would make sense. But seeing how it's National Treasure- solving puzzles, riddles, etc. The simple act of doing what you said would kind of cheapen the movie. They wanted to give the main character a chance to "work his magic" and solve it himself. There wouldn't be any suspense, or questions like : "Ah, what word is it? It's killing me.". There wouldn't be any excitement like that. Riley probably would have done this: "Well, now all we have to do is wa...Oh, it's done already. The word was death, figure that out."

[–] ClintJCL 14 years ago

Actually, you're all wrong. A program would hvae no way of knowing that the decryption was successful. I suppose you could have another program that examines the output, and looks for something that appears to be English sentences. Except, oh, the answer to the cipher wasn't an english sentence, it was a french-sounding name. No program is intelligent enough to examine the output and know it was successfully encrypted.

Granted, with the cipher only being 5 letters (or numbers), you are looking at an output set of (26+10)^5 possible decryptions: That's over 60 million possible output sets. He could have written a program to go through dictionary words and then random characters, but he still would have had to ponder over 60 million output sets.

Frankly, the way they did it in the movie was probably faster than what everyone keeps saying on this thread.

-ClintJCL
http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/category/reviews/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl

[–] superstringy 14 years ago

That's dead wrong. I wrote some code back in college that found the solution to a cypher that was 7 characters long. And the answer turned out to be my professor's last name. It was an in-class project and everyone figured it out. Granted the encryption could be much tougher in the movie, but the principle is still the same. It doesn't matter if the result is an obscure word. The answer to the cypher in the movie was "death". It's totally easy to write code to find out that when you type in "death" into the program that the output is something meaningful.

[–] ClintJCL 14 years ago

Let me know when you get a computer science degree and ace a combinatorix class. Then you might be qualified to give your opinion, which, by the way, included 0 math or theory. You are dead wrong, and simply said that out your ass.

-ClintJCL
http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/category/reviews/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl

[–] ClintJCL 14 years ago

Furthermore, you failed to describe your class assignment in enough detail for it to be useful. How did you know you successfully decrypted his cypher? By manually reading the results? How many times did you have to read those results? Imagine having to do that millions of times. An in-class made-to-be-easy assignment is no substitute for the real world.

-ClintJCL
http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/category/reviews/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl

[–] superstringy 14 years ago

Oh jeez, please. I have a graduate degree in physics and computer science. I wouldn't have brought that up if you weren't such a jerk. Not that I can prove that here anyway. Should I believe your credentials? I'm more than qualified to answer this problem, it's quite easy, in fact, which is why I brought up the question in the first place. Just because the solution to the cypher was an "obscure" french name means nothing. It's easy to reference the output for comparison to an encyclopedia and matches. It wouldn't be easy to know exactly the proper result, but it would be easy enough to parse the set and whittle it down to a handful of possibilities. I'm through with this obvious point. Best...

[–] 14 years ago

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[–] 14 years ago

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