Re-insert time of Isolinear chips in "Naked Now"

I was looking at this scene where Data re-inserts all of the isolinear chips in TNG episode "Naked Now".

[Bridge]

WORF: Sir, I estimate fourteen minutes until that mass gets here.
MACDOUGAL [OC]: No way, sir. I cannot replace these chips in fourteen minutes. Two hours, three

[Engineering]

MACDOUGAL: Maybe.
WESLEY: Data could assemble them back faster.

[Bridge]

PICARD: What, what's that? What's that, Wesley?

[Engineering]

WESLEY: Well, they're just simple isolinear chips, sir, to Data anyway. He can shuffle them like cards.
(Riker hauls the drunken Data to his feet)
RIKER: Come on, Data, hurry.

Ship's log, First Officer Riker. Enterprise will be destroyed unless it can be moved out of the path of the star material hurtling toward us. Our only hope is for Lieutenant Commander Data, in the time we have left, to regain his senses and reconnect engine power to the Bridge.

[Engineering]

DATA: Nice to see you, Wesley.
WESLEY: Hi, Mister Data.
RIKER: No time for courtesy. Get the damned control chips back in place, in the correct order. Now!
WESLEY: It's like a game. How fast can you do it?
DATA: Ah, a game!
(So, with Red Alert screaming, Data sits down at the panel and starts slotting chips in, very quickly)
WESLEY: I think I can switch this to main viewer, sir,
(Once he sees the reality of the situation, he steps back horrified)
RIKER: Data, we've got eight or nine minutes at most. Can you finish by then?
DATA: No, this will take slightly more time than we have, sir.
(Riker starts sweating)
RIKER: Damn it, no. I can't afford to get this.

...

[Engineering]

WESLEY: See how I reversed the fields on this, Commander? I made it into a repulser beam.
DATA: If we just had one minute more, sir,
WESLEY: If this were a hundred times more powerful than it is. Why not try it with the real thing? Why not reverse fields on this, Ma'am? If we just need an extra minute,
MACDOUGAL: It would take weeks of laying out new circuits.
WESLEY: Why not just see it in your head? Come off the main lead, split off at the force activator, then, then. If I could just think straight about this,

...

[Engineering]

(Picard arrives and starts injecting people)
RIKER: We're not going to make it, Captain. If we had just a minute or so.
WESLEY: Then reversing power leads, back through the force activator. Repulser beam hard against Tsiolkovsky. Don't you see? It's giving us a push off. The extra time we need.
RIKER: We're pushing away.
(The stellar matter hits the Tsiolkovsky, then Data finishes his task)
RIKER: Bridge, engage engines!
(Enterprise warps away in the nick of time)

[Bridge]

(Crusher's injections wipe the smiles off the remaining Bridge crew)
LAFORGE: Captain , something seemed to move us aside at the last minute.



Data fills up all of the empty slots with the blue isolinear chips. I count 154 of them.



He was able to get the first 20 chips re-inserted into the slots within slightly under the first 4 seconds. Or 5 chips per second. You can hear a pulse noise each time he inserts a chip into a slot. He keeps up a pretty steady pace too. He should have had all those chips put back in there within about 30 seconds at that rate. But in the story it took him 10 minutes.




The zoomed in clips of him putting the chips in at 37:52, 38:15, and 40:19 are all the same clip. Because of the layout of the chip slots on the board, all of the zoomed in shots have to be taking place at the same spot too. But the zoomed out shot at 39:34 shows this area to be inconsistent with the zoomed in frame shots where some are in and some are out.

 

Nice work!

 

Two wrongs making a right? That is, the material can be taken as showing how Data gets it wrong again and again and again and has to start anew every time...

I mean, it's not as if the chips would even be properly labeled or anything. Probably it is at least to some degree a case of shoving them in, seeing if they work, and trying again.

And yes, nice work indeed!

Timo Saloniemi

 

If I had to be forced to come up with some in-verse excuse, maybe he had to take out and re-insert chips and maybe in certain ways, in order to work. OH, that's some loose bullshit, but it's something.


And might I add, looking at a blow up image, that Data failed -- at least two chips are hanging out and down from their slots. Sloppy work for an andriod. I guess neither of those chips are important.

 

Well done indeed!

 

This was quite thorough. I salute you, sir.

I would respectfully suggest, though, that these particular details were never intended to stand up to such an exacting level of scrutiny... especially on standard-definition television sets of the time when TNG was originally aired.

Kor

 

Even with old rabbit ears TV sets one could see there weren't that many chips to take out and replace with new ones. Plus there's Wesley and the Cheif(?) engineer, standing there like dumbasses, not even trying to help -- surely two more people, even if greatly slower, is better than one in a situation where you are trying ti buy one mroe minute. Plus, why weren't they doing that before they got Data to start?

No wonder what's his face got replaced by a blind guy.

 

I don't see how more people butting in would help matters. They'd just obstruct Data's movements, hog all those chips he was just going to insert, and make more mistakes than Data does, moreover failing to see the pattern of their mistakes and learn from it.

Also, I don't see the option of starting early. They were drunk as skunks before they got the Data thing going, plus they saw no benefit from the process of reinserting - if it took two to three hours, they should much rather don spacesuits and push...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Per the quote from the initial post:

He didn't say, "Oh, man, sorry, sir, I'm too drunk off my ass to really do anything."

Clearly he must have thought he was capable enough. Plus, trying something when an extra minute is needed, is better than sitting there and trying nothing and assuming people are not smart enough to do it. Plus Data wasnt' doing it the whole time, so there was oppritunity for nobody to be in the way of Data.

 

I actually always considered these to be similar to a RAID that were common at the time , but without the "nice feature" of labeling each of the chips as far as where they go in which slot.

There would be a staggering combination of Chip positions if the problem is actually "put them in the right order without knowing what order they go in". In which case its approximately 3.0898^E271 (271 Zero's) Which probably takes data significantly longer than 10 minutes unless there is a visual clue that he's got an exact match.

Of course some of the chips have different markings on them which may eliminate a great number of possible pairings. IT could also be that each of the slots have certain chips assigned to them so that the compartments of 3 really have only 6 possible combinations. Of course the 13 slots still have 6 billion possible combinations.

Bottom Line: Some movie magic but I'm sure someone could backwards engineer some plausible explanations. Like knowing a red dot and a black dot chip always starts that top bay of 13. The next one down is a double black dot chip starting. Those long black bar chips are always seen two in a row if they are. Something to get it down to the 6,000 or so combinations Data could have done in 10 minutes assuming he keeps up the 10 chip per second speed.

 

Here's the thing though, The Naked Now is just a crap episode...

...Sorry, I thought I had more of a point to make there but then I realized that covers everything.

 

Assuming that chips had to be inserted (and perhaps retracted again in certain steps) in exactly the right order, other people couldn't have helped Data with his task once he began, except for perhaps pre-sorting some stuff. I agree however, that the drunken engineer could have started anyway before Data was there, and given Data a headstart, even if it was slight.

My question is though why Starfleet would invent and install such extremely convoluted mechanisms

 

That is a good question. It seems most of the series isolinear control chips are supposed to be some preset package of executable code and authorizations. The idea that basic functioning of the ship would depend on easily removable, nearly identical chips being inserted in the right order without at least some basic hardwired command routines for basic functions is beyond silly.

Like in four hundred years of computer science, we came full circle back to punch cards.

 

I assumed the federation was like the federal government and simply sourced from the lowest bidder most times.

 

Well, when you put it like that, it's hard to disagree. ;-)


I sure hope anybody involved in Trek shows now and in the future reads these forums and sees all the shit we point out and makes an effort to avoid more shit in the future.

Which by the way, brings up something that has really annoyed me the more I think about it and this seems like as good a place as any to bring it up:

Why the fuck did Voyager and Enterprise make so many continuity mistakes in regards to things established in other episodes of other Trek series? With TNG you could say the internet wasn't what it was, and even part way through D.S.9. you could argue the same, but by the time of Voyager and Enterprise, the internet was teeming with sites covering every little fact of Trek, including Trekcore, so there's ZERO excuse to make these mistakes. Further more, there were multiple fan sites to register and ask for help on -- they didn't need to reveal who they are or why they were asking, just say they're curious about this and that. It basically boils down to that old thread bomb of Samuel L. Jackson saying something like, "Google, motherfu***r, know how to use it?!"


(no, I chose to sensor it -- no rule saying I had to)

 

She.

She thought she was incapable of inserting the chips in the time allotted. She was right. By the math of it, five of her would not have been capable enough, and only two could attempt the job simultaneously. There would simply be no point in dabbling with impossibilities like that.

Well, no. The assumption would be generally correct, alas; here it would be specifically correct for the scenario of boosting Data's actions. Not only would MacDougal be a massive obstruction to Data and all that, but the best she could do would not win that crucial minute or even an appreciable fraction thereof if the math held up. Data's superskills turned an estimated 150 minutes into just 15. In order to turn 60 seconds into, say, 1 second, MacDougal would have to do better than Data. Winning just two or three seconds (still beyond her estimated abilities) would be of zero actual help.

Exploring alternate venues of survival is what she should have been doing. And that was no doubt hindered by her being drunk - she was injected with the antidote just seconds before the one-minute issue arose!

How so? Data was sitting there the whole time, his arms a blur.

Interestingly, Data's arms are not a blur in other situations where he is highly motivated to act extremely fast. Say, when he's assembling that UV beacon in "Identity Crisis". It would appear that he can only switch to superspeed on nearly mindless, repetitive tasks; perhaps he chose a strategy here, one of trying blind combinations in a situation where putting thought to it would be much slower? That's how computers used to win in chess, after all. (As pointed out above, it couldn't be all blind combinations - those would be just a subset of the things to be done.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

HEY! HEY! HEY! Don't talk about Wesley like that!

Data was not in Engineering the whole time. He was brought there by Riker. Wesley, the lady, and that guy in the Engineering worksuit(?) tossing the chips up in the air, were there and could have attempted something and only the guy flinging the chips up appears to have been incapable.

 

Hmm. While the tossing took place, there was no way for the sober heroes and heroines to intervene - Wesley had that forcefield up. It appears that MacDougal only found out about the extracted control chips when the field came down; in any case, she dove for them right away. When she at that very moment overheard Worf's time limit of 14 minutes, she said reinsertion was out of the question because it would take too long, and Wesley immediately offered Data as an alternative. So all we can fault MacDougal for is not making progress during Riker's turbolift ride yet.

How long was that ride? Five minutes, if both Riker and Worf were correct in their respective ETAs for the VFX of Doom. Yet we see progress: What used to be a big flat pile in the center of the floor is now two piles, one right below the panel, and the bottom row appears to have been inserted already. This despite Shimoda's continuing interference.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Five minute turbolift rides on the Enterprise D -- now the episode gets worse.

 

So what I'm getting from all this is that it isn't Data who saves the day here. He's just a machine, after all, and can work fast. It's really Wesley who's the supercomputer. I mean, if it wasn't for that extra minute.....

If you don't believe me, just "see it in your head!"