Futurama: The Prisoner of Benda

Cafe Society
41

Just watched the episode. IMHO, while it’s not as emotionally satisfying as episodes like “Jurassic Bark”, this is more along the lines of “The Farnsworth Parabox” and is in the upper echelon of episodes for that reason alone.

I need to brush-up on group theory, having studied it years ago, but I’m impressed with the effort that Ken Keeler went to, to the point where the blackboard is filled with real mathematics and not just gibberish. This is first-grade geek comedy.

As for the recycling of the mind-switch trope, anyone who’s paying attention will know that Futurama, at its core, is about exploring well-worn science fiction tropes in a comedic context. This criticism is so off-base that I don’t know where to begin.

And the episode was hilarious from beginning to end.

42

Sweet Clyde! Laugh derisively at him! And hold a news conference to announce that orcenio is a jive sucker!

43

As far as group theory I am amazed he actually had to do his own proof. Out of all the group theory proofs we did in abstract algebra I was near certain we had done one that represents the same thing (balls in boxes is a favorite of the field). My immediate thought was that you only need 2 extra to fix any case.

On the other hand, the day I realized abstract algebra was starting to make sense was the day I switched to CS.

44

I thought the main concept of this episode was funny and like others I really enjoyed some of the visual characters jokes, especially Zoidberg walking sideways in Fry’s body. The washbucket sequence was funny. I wouldn’t mind seeing the humanoid washbucket be worked into a semi-recurring character.

However, I thought the episode wasn’t as strong as it could have been. It did remind me of one of my least liked Futurama moments, the part in “Three Hundred Big Boys” where the Professor makes out with an over-weight woman, the point being to try to gross out the viewer. It was pretty lame and also seemed unnecessarily hostile towards overweight people, which should be below Futurama. This episode went that direction twice, both with Amy’s butter eating as well as the make-out scene between Zoidberg/Fry and Professor/Leela.

All in all, this was an okay episode with both rough patches as well as good laughs. It reminded me of the EyePhone episode, which had an interesting idea but had to throw in a disgusting puke-eating goat, which will keep me from watching it again.

45

Another thing to appreciate about this episode was pretty good Hungarian accents. Ya gotta love the voice talent… A quicky summation of how Hungarians speak is if you say, "I drink wine from a vineyard like, " as “I drink vine from a winyard.” Yup, half my family sounded like Gabor sisters growing up.

46

Mine still does! My mum was good natured enough to get a laugh out of it, anyway. We robo-hungarians are a self deprecating people, rife with were-cars. :smiley:

47

Hey, I was going to write all that just now. Darn you!

I have noticed a strong tendency to greater physical humor (sexual in particular) with the new episodes, which is just fine with me. Even when it’s Zoidberg-on-Prof-Farnsworth heat. Oh my.

Plus some more timeless quotes:

“I’m afraid we’ll have to use… math!”
“Science cannot move forward without heaps!”
“As I told you on Sucker Punch Day, I’m THROUGH being a chump!”

48

:eek: NOOooooooooooooooooooooooo…

49

Robo-Hungarian Emperor: “If you are a bender unit, then why are you filled with fetid water?”

Something about that line makes me howl with laughter.

50

This thread cannot advance without heaps!

51

I greatly enjoyed the episode, but my main irk, if it’s worth calling it that, is that the way the concluding theorem is momentarily presented (quickly flashed in jargon and notation to be blindly admired but with the connotation that it would be beyond the grasp of most of the audience) makes it seem like something “For mathematical experts only”, instead of revealing how easily graspable it is. I dislike the pernicious effect this culturally ubiquitous portrayal of mathematics has, and would’ve been thrilled to see it transcended. Alas. Still, good stuff.

Here’s a very simple proof of the theorem in plain English. To fix any finite amount of mind-swapping:

Step 1: Have everybody who’s messed up arrange themselves in circles, each facing the body their mind should land in (e.g., if Fry’s mind is in Zoidberg’s body, then the Zoidberg body should face the Fry body).

Step 2: Go get two “fresh” (as of yet never mind-swapped) people. Let’s call them Helper A and Helper B.

Step 3: Fix the circles one by one as follows:

3.0) Start each time with Helper A and Helper B’s minds in either their own or each other’s bodies

3.1) Pick any circle of messed-up people you like and unwrap it into a line with whoever you like at the front

3.2) Swap the mind at the front of the line into Helper A’s body

3.3) From back to front, have everybody in the line swap minds with Helper B’s body in turn. (This moves each mind in the line, apart from the front one, forward into the right body)

3.4) Swap the mind in Helper A’s body back where it belongs, into the body at the back of the line. Now the circle/line has been completely fixed, and the Helpers’ minds are back in either their own or each other’s bodies. (The one side effect is that the Helpers’ minds switched places. But that’s ok.)

Step 4: At the very end, after all the circles have been fixed, mind-swap the two Helpers if necessary (i.e., in case there was originally an odd number of messed-up circles).

(For those who care, I’ve taken the liberty of slightly departing from/cleaning up the presentation given on the Futurama greenboard: setting the arbitrary i to 1, commuting the final (x, i + 1) and (y, 1) transpositions, and thinking of {2, 3, …, k, 1} as the back-to-front order of the line. Or, rather, I’ve taken the liberty of just writing down the simplest solution I could come up with, and then describing how it relates to the provided solution.)

52

Eh - I didn’t get that sense at all (that is, that they skipped past it to avoid teaching the audience about math). Futurama isn’t edutainment - the appearance of the actual theorem is a side-joke for the subset of the audience with the mathematical background to figure it out.

You need to think of it from the perspective of comedy/ storytelling rather than information dispensation. The actual plot relevance of the scene is that it provides a nice “reset button” that doesn’t feel cheap. Between the numerous references to high-level math throughout and the Globetrotter montage at the end, I think the episode clearly communicates to the rest of the audience that the quickly-flashed theorem is for realsies, even if they don’t know enough math (or simply don’t care) to check the proof.

If they had spent more time on the theorem, the net “educational” effect could potentially be positive: non-geeks could end up with due appreciation for some new math. From a comedic standpoint, however, such a move would be extremely detrimental. What would have been a pretty hilarious five-second aside will instead feel utterly beaten into the ground - instead of a bunch of geeks laughing and high-fiving each other for getting the reference while the rest of the audience shrugs and moves on, you’d have those geeks feeling like you were making the joke too obvious (read: unfunny) and simultaneously losing your grasp on the non-geek audience, because they will instinctively recoil at what would seem like a big, unwieldy load of exposition (not because of the math).

As is, the twin goals of geek humor and efficient storytelling are both met: you get your graduate level math joke AND you don’t destroy the episode’s pacing on a minor plot point.

53

I understand the pacing difficulties, that Futurama isn’t edutainment, etc. Note that I never anywhere said that they should have taught their audience any math; I was just disappointed with the manner (not merely the speed, although I can see how my wording would suggest that) in which they did choose to present the math at the end.

The very fact that you call this a graduate level math joke and speak of how one might not know enough math to understand the proof is the detrimental effect I was referring to. This is not graduate level math; this is stuff so simple a small child could understand it (as explained in my previous post). But the way it was presented made it look so much more arcane, and, I feel, contributes unnecessarily [albeit unintentionally] to a general “Math is hard and not for normal people” perception. Futurama is far from the only show that does this, but it’s still irksome everytime it happens, and, like I said, I’d’ve been thrilled to see it transcended. I greatly enjoyed the episode, but I’d’ve been thrilled to see that one aspect handled a little differently.

54

I understand the point, but I instead see it as geeks indulging in a bit of “secret club” camaraderie. Sure, the idea may not be as complex as the notation makes it seem, but obfuscation is a proud geek tradition that shouldn’t be sneezed at.

55

Let’s split the difference and call it undergraduate. As far as difficulty, it might not be that hard, however in terms of familiarity it’s not that recognizable. At least where I’m from, we don’t study that branch of math until college level, and then only as an elective or part of a major.

One might be able to “figure it out” through common sense / logic, but unless one had taken that specific math class, one wouldn’t immediately recognize what method to use for a solution, and one definitely wouldn’t understand the specific notation used on the virtual chalkboard.

I agree with the other poster that there was no entertainment value in a more specific explanation.

Also, your method is more of an explanation of the particular operating procedure than a proof per se. Although I can see how it can be interpret a proof of the particular solution. However the really interesting mathematical question goes unanswered - how do you discover the solution in the first place? That requires some kind of derivation…

I do agree with you though about the ‘math is hard’ part. When the Professor said “we’ll have to do… math!” They probably should have had one character comment 'oh no!" but another comment “yay!”.

56

I actually thought that was a neat character moment for the Professor, though - even if it wasn’t intentional. I mean, sure math sure be accessible to the masses - but would the Professor ever think that? Certainly not! His natural instinct is to make his work as baroque and unapproachable as possible.

57

Well, it doesn’t really matter to me what you call it, so long as you recognize that the relevant morsel of math is something extraordinarily simple and which any layperson could quickly grasp with no prerequisites.

I assume by “where I’m from, we don’t study that branch of math until college level”, you are referring to abstract group theory; sure, but a college background in group theory is no more requisite to the relevant morsel of math than a college background in group theory is requisite to understanding integer addition or how to read an analog clock.

(That having been said, an attitude that group theory is a tricky subject only capable of being handled by college-age mathematicians-in-training is problematic as well; there’s nothing intrinsically difficult about elementary group theory, apart from the fact that, as a matter of curricular standardization, we tend to teach it at this time rather than that time. Hell, along similar lines, we already do in large part teach the even more complicated theory of ordered fields to middle- and high-schoolers; we just call it “algebra” instead.)

Of course one wouldn’t understand the notation if one wasn’t exposed to it previously!; that’s part of the disappointing element of the presentation that makes the result needlessly inaccessible to the majority of the lay-audience.

I don’t know what distinction there is between figuring things out through common sense/logic and figuring them out through math; what I would have been thrilled to see emphasized is that the latter is nothing but the former, done over and over. I certainly don’t see how having taken a class on finite groups would have helped you immediately recognize what method to use for a solution for the Futurama problem, except possibly insofar as that one might already have had it beaten into them that “Finite permutations decompose into disjoint cycles”. But this is just common sense/logic, too… if everyone faces the body their mind should land in, well, this never ends. They must form either infinite lines or wrap around into circles, and there aren’t enough people for the former.

I don’t care about providing a more specific explanation. Like I said, I don’t care if they even explain any math at all. My concern is that the way in which the math was portrayed has the unfortunate side effect of making it seem like the more specific explanation is something which only mathematical experts with significant training could hope to discuss, rather than just a small slice of common sense/logic.

It’s as much of a proof as what the Futurama greenboard said; indeed, it’s basically just a translation of it, slightly rearranged and with the “By routine verification” explained more. What’s wrong with it? It’s a constructive proof that takes you step by step through the solution algorithm and explains why it will always work for any permutation.

shrugs It requires sitting down and thinking about the question in search of an answer, same as any other question, but there’s nothing on the Futurama greenboard that gives any indication of how you might discover the solution in the first place, and so far as I know, there’s no standard mathematical tool that allows one to mechanically derive it either. What is it that you think college-level math brings to the table here?

Yay! (That someone agrees with me about something… :))

58

Ah, yes, that would be a nice, if unintentional, interpretation. Although, it wasn’t the Professor, but rather two of the Globetrotters who discovered and wrote up the solution. Cockily obfuscating bastards, the lot of them… :slight_smile:

59

(Although, despite my joy that you agree with me that there was an unintentional “math is hard” tone ultimately conveyed, I don’t actually think that scene was problematic. I recognize that the whole joke there was “Everyone thinks math is so hard, to an overdramatic degree. Pshaw to them; let’s do some”.)

60

Have you guys heard Matt Groening and David X. Cohen are making a new series set in the year 4000? It’s called Futurella and they showed a preview on Comic-Con. Here’s the preview.