Live data from Hacker News

Travelling Salesman – Official Movie Site

travellingsalesmanmovie.com

41–50 of 51 posts

Re: Travelling Salesman – Official Movie Site

#41
post #18

I'll be honest, this looks comically bad and has no merit besides the fact that it has a geeky premise. I'm sure the underlying discussion of "What if P=NP? is solved?" is incredibly interesting but what I got from the trailer was that this was a movie with a bad script, bad cinematography, bad acting, and bad editing.

I'm hesitant to totally dismiss the movie, but the trailer definitely left me cold. In addition to all the problems you mentioned, I feel like they blew the "____ simplified" gimmick, which almost worked to tie the trailer together.

In some ways the trailer reminded me of Primer but it didn't quite make the low-budget vibe work in it's favor. Having made a few student films, but never having made a good short film, it's still hard for me to put my finger on the little differences that make something like this work.

Re: Travelling Salesman – Official Movie Site

#43
post #18

I'll be honest, this looks comically bad and has no merit besides the fact that it has a geeky premise. I'm sure the underlying discussion of "What if P=NP? is solved?" is incredibly interesting but what I got from the trailer was that this was a movie with a bad script, bad cinematography, bad acting, and bad editing.

I'm hesitant to totally dismiss the movie, but the trailer definitely left me cold. In addition to all the problems you mentioned, I feel like they blew the "____ simplified" gimmick, which almost worked to tie the trailer together. In some ways the trailer reminded me of Primer but it didn't quite make the low-budget vibe work in it's favor. Having made a few student films, but never having made a good short film, i…

Delivery. The trailer lost me when the characters were just actors delivering lines; characters in Primer came across as speaking for real. Such a little difference, but one that makes it work.

Re: Travelling Salesman – Official Movie Site

#44
I saw this film at the premiere in Philadelphia about a year ago... I was prepared for it to be awful, but I thought it was actually pretty good, albeit a) a bit more like a filmed play in structure than a film (largely takes place in one room with 4 or 5 actors), and b) comically low budget means you have to excuse a few places it's... lacking production value. But I think if you enjoyed, say, Primer and/or Twelve Angry Men, than you're likely to enjoy the film overall, or at least not think it's nearly as bad as the trailer may have made you fear!

Re: Travelling Salesman – Official Movie Site

#46
post #45
post #33

Melting point of sand (silicon dioxide, or Quartz): 1723 C. So what material is the coin in the example?

Don't you see? Finding the coin is easy. Changing the sand to glass and finding the coin is trivial.

TECHNOLOGY. POLITICS. MONEY. ENERGY. SCIENCE. DATA.

Re: Travelling Salesman – Official Movie Site

#48
Ken Regan, who is some kind of computerologist, has a really interesting post pointing out that TSP is actually one of the easier NP-complete problems, and even an O(n) solution only reduces the interesting NP-complete problems to really hard polynomial-time problems.

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/the-travelling-sale...

Re: Travelling Salesman – Official Movie Site

#49
post #19

Could be good. I really enjoyed 'Deception Point' by Dan Brown and it seems this could be something of the sort...

If it's anything like Deception Point, I'll be staying well clear of it. Typically, stories in that genre use compsci-babble as smoke and mirrors to cover up the lack of storyline.

This film at least seems to be well-researched, unlike Dan Brown.

Re: Travelling Salesman – Official Movie Site

#50
post #12
post #5

The trailer is interesting but the IMDb rating (4.8) and the top comment on YouTube make it look unimpressive. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybd5rbQ5rU

> the IMDb rating (4.8) Well actually it reads > Ratings: 4,8/10 from 53 users so I do not think the population is big enough to be relevant.

Imo, considering the genre of the film and the limited audience of indie films, the rating population is not that important in this case.
Post reply on HN