War Games

This is a Movie directed by John Badham, where the main character is a teenager, called David Lightman and starring by Matthew Broaderick. David loves computers a lot, he likes to discover new functionalities with his computer, he takes it as a challenge. He heard that a new game is being released, so he took his technical abilities to be the first one to play that game. He entered to a rare interface where he found some names that sounds like funny videogames, but to play them he discovered that he had to introduce a password. He passed many hours trying to discover the password, until he found it.

David selected a game where he had to launch a massive attack to other nation. He was playing as Russia, but he did not realize that this was actually a simulation of an actual war and the machine also thought that this was a real simulation. David passed many difficulties to discovered that this was just a simulation and the USA was not being attacked by Russia. But there was a problem, the machine was taking actions to prevent the “attack” so this intelligence wanted to attack Russia. David discovered that the only way to stop the machine was teaching it to don´t play the game because nobody would win. David learned this algorithm by making the machine play tic-tac-toe against itself.

This movie was interesting because it shows us that at that time computers and technology was marvelous, people could contact another computer via phone and everyone can access by this way to another system. So, for me it was so fascinated that a teenager knew all this kind of trick and have all the knowledge to take advantage to this technology. This movie learned us that technology knowledge is reachable for anyone.