Computers and science fiction – an essay - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 353

of aliens have attacked Earth and almost annihilated the human race. In prep-
aration for the inevitable next attack, the world government has developed a
program to identify and develop the next generation of military commanders.
The hero of the novel, Ender Wiggin, is taken at a young age to a training
center known as the Battle School. There he participates in an increasingly
difficult series of war game simulations and displays exceptional skills, often
using unconventional tactics to win the game. Card's topic is now required
reading for several real military organizations. A movie version of the topic was
released in 2013. The movie The Last Starfighter has a similar theme, in which
the hero who saves the human race from defeat is a video game champion from
a trailer park ( Fig. 17.26 ).

Hackers and cyberterrorism
The threat of hackers illegally entering computer systems has also proved
fertile ground for science fiction. One of the earliest movies to explore this
theme was the 1983 movie War Games ( Fig. 17.27a and 17.27b ). The U.S. Air
Force Strategic Missile Command has found that the military personnel in the
missile silos are unwilling to actually launch their nuclear missiles in response
to what they should believe is a real nuclear attack by the Russians. The mis-
siles have therefore been put under the control of the WOPR computer - War
Operations Plan Response - which is able to run war-game simulations and
learn from its experience. A young computer hacker unwittingly breaks into
the top secret WOPR computer and starts to play what he thinks is a game
called Global Thermonuclear War. In reality this starts a very real countdown
that would culminate in WOPR launching a full-scale nuclear attack on the
Russians with the U.S. military command unable to stop the countdown. The
WOPR computer is sentient, however, and the young hacker is able to avert
nuclear war by convincing the machine of the pointlessness of the strategy of
Mutual Assured Destruction. He does this by having WOPR repeatedly play tic-
tac-toe as an example of a game that no one can win.
Other early movies in this genre are The Net in 1995, which stars Sandra
Bullock as a computer analyst who suffers a theft of her electronic identity.
From a friend who dies mysteriously on the way to meet her, she has received
a copy of a “backdoor” to a widely used commercial computer security pro-
gram called Gatekeeper. In their efforts to retrieve the floppy disc containing
the secret backdoor program, a shadowy group of cyberterrorists called the
Praetorians attempt to kill her. When their attempts fail, they erase her online
identity - Social Security number, bank accounts, everything. After a tense
chase, Bullock is able to email the details of the fraud to the FBI and undo
the erasure of her identity.
The 2007 movie Live Free or Die Hard was inspired by an article in Wired mag-
azine by John Carlin in 1997. In post-Cold War simulations by the U.S. govern-
ment, teams of experts - recruited from several federal agencies and from the
military - routinely plan possible responses to cyberattacks on the U.S. critical
infrastructure:

Fig. 17.27a. A poster for the movie
War Games created by Matt Dupuis.
The display depicts the trajectories of
intercontinental ballistic missiles fired
between the two superpowers.

Fig. 17.27b. A screen shot from War
Games with the WOPR computer
commenting on the pointlessness of
thermonuclear war.

The teams are presented with a series of hypothetical incidents, said to have
occurred during the preceding 24 hours. Georgia's telecom system has gone