S04.E05: Prophets

[basiltherat]

So there's a shootout at a fancy hotel and a desk clerk is shot point-blank -- who does Samaritan report to?  Why, Samaritan, of course!  And the circle of cover-up is complete.

[kwnyc]

 

I'm pretty sure Samaritan has been given nationwide feeds.

Wasn't that the deal Decima made with the Senator? Give Samaritan NYC as a test drive, and then after the (Decima-orchestrated) kidnapping & blowing up of the courthouse, they agreed to turn 'em ALL over to Decima?

[AimingforYoko]

Samaritan is getting the NSA feeds. The NSA is not nationwide. The NSA is worldwide.

[Raingirlkm]

Samaritan had just the New York feeds during the test run at the end of season 3, but after the apparent success in taking down Vigilance, they got access to all the feeds.

 

We have seen to Machine accessing worldwide feeds, so I would agree that now Samaritan has that access too.

Edited October 23, 2014 by Raingirlkm

[shura]

How fancy was that hotel really? Jason Ritter was offered a last-minute, deluxe room for $200. In Manhattan in this day and age? I wish.

 

Did the show explain how Samaritan managed to kill the governor-elect without raising suspicion? Everybody seemed to think it was from natural causes, or maybe from a drug interaction or something like that (I can't remember). Martine showed up as if she was about to assassinate her, did she stare the governor to death?

[Netfoot]

Root is the Machine's avatar in the world of meat.  Ideally (from the Machine's point of view) her behaviour will be totally in accordance with the needs and wishes of the Machine, with no human feelings or emotions allowed to interfere.   Recently, Root has been showing some tendency toward caring about the other players, and about people/humanity in general.  We also learned in this episode, that Root has not heard the Machine's voice at all, for some months.  Are we to assume that the new caring side of Root has come about as a result of her isolation from the Machine, and the absence of her voice in her ear?  That without the Machine's direct verbal influence, her avatar is developing human characteristics independently?

[ABay]

Episodes last season made it clear the Machine was teaching Root to care about saving human lives (or sparing them, in the case of Hersch).

[txbowler]

At some point, based on where the writers are leading us, I would believe the 2 machines will face off.  Now initially we were lead to believe due to the massive need of chip speed and power, that Samaritan was the more powerful program.

 

Now for the non IT tech of us here, programmers design and write different ways.  One programmer can accomplish the same task with 1000 lines of code while another programmer accomplishes it with 300 lines of more efficient code.  So from an IT perspective, the power and chip speed Samaritan requires may not necessarily mean it is a more powerful AI than the machine.

 

As we have already seen, the machine was smart enough to dis-assemble it self little by little and spread itself over who knows where. 

 

And the one tidbit I will focus on is the constant reclassification of the machines assets on Samaritan.  Root, under the machines guidance, was able to set up that server with code that doesn't allow Samaritan to see them.  Maybe that indicate that Harold's program is actually the smarter program but is just playing under Harold's rules.  I think one day, Harold will set it loose on Samaritan.  

[Syme]

One programmer can accomplish the same task with 1000 lines of code while another programmer accomplishes it with 300 lines of more efficient code.  So from an IT perspective, the power and chip speed Samaritan requires may not necessarily mean it is a more powerful AI than the machine.

 

Are you saying Harold wrote an AI system in assembler????

 

But you may have found Samaritan's weak spot -- it's running on .NET;

all the Machine need to do is watch for the next Patch Tuesday, and.....

 

{Once worked with a guy who wrote PDP-11 drivers in octal.....and I'm not making that up...}

[Netfoot]

Are you saying Harold wrote an AI system in assembler????

 

But you may have found Samaritan's weak spot -- it's running on .NET;

all the Machine need to do is watch for the next Patch Tuesday, and.....

 

{Once worked with a guy who wrote PDP-11 drivers in octal.....and I'm not making that up...}

 

Probably not the entire AI, but at least some of it probably was written in assembler. 

 

.NET!  LOL!

 

{I've coded in octal and hex and symbolic (as well as mnemonic) assembler on PDP-11s and other mainframes.  Never wrote a driver from scratch, but I've debugged one and patched it's bugs in hex...}