Movie password

I mentioned in the previous post that I watched 2010: The Year We Make Contact last night and got nerd-sniped by the mention of Lagrange points at the beginning. I got nerd-sniped again in a scene describing a password.

The instructions are

Put in nine nines, take the square root and press the integer.

I looked up the line just now to get it right. When I was watching the movie I thought the instructions said to take the integers, i.e. ignore the decimal point. I wondered at the time why not just say take the square root of 10.

Let's look at the numbers.

bc -l>>> sqrt(999999999)31622.77658587240501519419>>> sqrt(10)3.16227766016837933199

If the calculator displays up to eight digits, or rounds to nine digits, the digits in the two results are the same.

However, the intention was to press a key that takes the integer part, and so the password would be

999999999 = 31622

Update: I feel a little silly now. Someone pointed out that the calculator itself is the control device, not a means for calculating a password. The password is the keystrokes described above; the number calculated is irrelevant.

The post Movie password first appeared on John D. Cook.