Talk:Stephen Falken/@comment-199.64.7.241-20190606141439

It is more likely that the character of Dr. Stephen Falken was based on the mathematician, electrical engineer and cryptographer Claude Shannon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon

Specifically, when David is searching about Falken in the library, he encounters a (fictional) Scientific American magazine from June 1963 about Falken's Maze, which shows a real mouse on the left and a mechanical mouse on the right, both navigating a maze. See "Shannon's Mouse" as one of the first examples of machine learning and artifical intelligence (Joshua).

See also, Shannon's seminal 1949 paper when he worked for Bell Labs entitled ""Programming a Computer for playing Chess," and "Shannon's Number" which is an estimate of the complexity of solving a chess game (game theory).

https://vision.unipv.it/IA1/aa2009-2010/ProgrammingaComputerforPlayingChess.pdf

Finally, see "Shannon's Maxim" which relates to cryptography and the design of complex systems with the fundamental takeaway that "the enemy knows the system."

The actor cast to play Falken even looks like Shannon.