The coin toss revisited

[Corbent]

*SPOILERS FOR "THE SIXTH DAY" AND "THE PRESTIGE" AND PROBABLY THE GAME ITSELF. FAIR WARNING*

Spoiler below!

This whole thing makes me think of movies like "The Sixth Day". The cloning process was in fact, pointless to the cloned individual, the fact that a copy of yourself will live on doesn't change that you are going to die and your conciousness will be lost. This applies to the mystery room proposed in the original post and I think it applies to the ARK project too.

It also reminds me of "The Prestige". This is a very concrete example of the coin toss live or die scenario. I really loved that movie for some reason. "It took courage to climb into that machine every night... not knowing... if I'd be the man in the box... or the prestige.". Now I don't think the machine working is random, that sometimes you are transported somewhere else, leaving a copy behind and sometimes a copy is made somewhere else. I think the machine has a fixed way of working but it's impossible to tell which is happening, since both are exact copies, they hold the same memories up to the point of climbing onto the machine.

The most logical for me is that the one that stays in place is the original, with a copy simply being made elsewhere. Which leads me to believe the magician was doomed from the very first try.