HAL 9000
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HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) is a fictional computer/character in the Space Odyssey series, the first being the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey, written by Arthur C. Clarke in 1968. HAL is an artificial intelligence, the sentient on-board computer of the spaceship Discovery. HAL is usually represented only as his television camera "eyes" that can be seen throughout the Discovery spaceship. The voice of HAL 9000 was performed by Canadian actor Douglas Rain. HAL became operational on January 12, 1997 (1992 in the movie) [1] at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois, and was created by Dr. Chandra. In the 2001 film, HAL is depicted as being capable not only of speech recognition, facial recognition, and natural language processing, but also lip reading, art appreciation, interpreting emotions, expressing emotions and reasoning.
In other languages than English, HAL might have another name: for instance, in the French version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, his name is stated as being CARL, for Cerveau Analytique de Recherche et de Liaison ("Analytic Research and Communication Brain"). However, the famous camera plates still read "HAL 9000".
Some versions state that the name HAL was derived by a one letter shift (see Caesar cipher) from the name IBM, although this has been denied by both Arthur C. Clarke and his fictional character Dr. Chandra, who states that "by now, any idiot should know that HAL stands for Heuristic ALgorithmic" (2010).
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[edit] HAL's history
[edit] HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, after HAL appears to be mistaken about a fault in the spacecraft, astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole consider disconnecting his cognitive circuits. They believe that HAL cannot hear them, but are unaware that HAL is capable of lip reading. Faced with the prospect of disconnection, HAL proceeds to kill Poole while Poole is repairing the ship, as well as the other members of the crew who are in suspended animation by disabling life support systems for the suspended animation chambers the crew is placed in. Realizing what has occurred, astronaut Bowman then shuts the machine down. HAL's central core is depicted as a room full of brightly lit computer modules mounted in arrays from which they can be inserted or removed. Bowman shuts down HAL by removing modules from service one by one; as he does so, we witness HAL's consciousness degrading. He regurgitates material that was programmed into him early on in his life, including announcing the date he became operational as 12 January 1992. By the time HAL's logic is completely gone, he begins singing the song "Daisy Bell", which is perhaps the most recognised scene in the film. This song was chosen because in 1962 Arthur C. Clarke was coincidentally visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility at the time of a remarkable speech synthesis demonstration by physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr who created one of the most famous moments in the history of Bell Labs by using an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech. Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer vocoder recreated the song "Daisy Bell", with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews. Arthur C. Clarke was so impressed that he later used it in this climactic scene.[1] HAL's final act of any significance is to prematurely play a prerecorded message from Mission Control which reveals the true reasons for the mission to Jupiter, something that had been kept secret from the crew beforehand and not been intended to be played until the ship entered Jupiter orbit. HAL 9000 is also known for a chess game he plays with Poole, whose defeat is seen as an ominous foreshadowing to both the future events of the movie and the increasing dominance of machine over man.
The book differs from the film in a number of details, e.g.
- The book explains far more explicitly the causes of HAL's behavior
- In the film, HAL shuts Bowman out of the craft after Bowman attempts to retrieve Poole's body. In the book, Bowman stays within the ship and is forced to shut down HAL after HAL attempts to kill him by opening the ship's airlocks.
[edit] HAL in 2010: Odyssey Two
In the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two, HAL is restarted by his creator, Dr. Chandra, who arrives on the Soviet spaceship Leonov. Dr. Chandra discovers that HAL's crisis was caused by a programming contradiction: he was constructed for "the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment", yet his orders required him to keep the discovery of the monolith TMA-1 a secret. This contradiction created a "Hofstadter - Moebius loop," reducing HAL to paranoia. This paranoia produced a creative, if rather sociopathic, solution: HAL would not have to withhold information if there were nobody from whom to withhold the information. Ergo, HAL made the decision to kill the crew, thereby allowing him to obey both his hardwired instructions to report data truthfully and in full and his orders to keep the monolith a secret - nobody remained from whom to keep the secret.
The alien intelligences controlling the monoliths have grandiose plans for Jupiter, plans which place the Leonov in danger. Its human crew devises an escape plan, which unfortunately requires leaving the Discovery and HAL behind, to be destroyed. Dr. Chandra explains the danger, and HAL sacrifices himself for the Leonov's crew. In the moment of his destruction, the monolith-makers transform HAL into a non-corporeal being, so that David Bowman's avatar may have a companion.
The details in the book and film are nominally the same, with one important exception: in the film, HAL functions normally after being reactivated. In the book, it is revealed that his voice circuits were destroyed during the shutdown, forcing him to communicate through screen text. Also, in the film the Leonov crew lies to HAL about the dangers that he faced; suspecting that if he knew he would be destroyed he wouldn't initate the engine-burn necessary to get the Leonov back home. However, in the novel he is told from the outset. However, in both cases the suspense comes from what HAL will do when he knows that he may be destroyed by his actions.
In the novel, as the Leonov is leaving Jupiter space, Curnow tells Floyd that Dr. Chandra has begun designing HAL 10,000. However, it is unknown if Curnow was joking, and 2061 indicated that Chandra died on the journey back to Earth, making the point moot.
The session of keyboard/screen interaction between HAL and Dr. Chandra has a taste of SHRDLU, which both increases the realism of the scene, and gives an interesting insight of the perception of Artificial Intelligence at the time the book was written.
[edit] HAL in 2061: Odyssey Three and 3001: The Final Odyssey
In 2061: Odyssey Three, Heywood Floyd is surprised to encounter HAL, now stored alongside Dave Bowman in the Europa monolith.
In 3001: The Final Odyssey, we meet the merged forms of Dave Bowman and HAL. The two have merged into one entity called Halman after Bowman rescued HAL from the dying Discovery One spaceship towards the end of 2010: Odyssey Two. Halman helps Frank Poole infect the monolith (which it once served) with a computer virus; as the primitive life in Jupiter's clouds were sacrificed to make Jupiter into a sun to warm Europa, it is feared that humanity would in turn be sacrificed for the new life on Europa.
[edit] SAL 9000
HAL 9000 has at least one Earthbound twin, SAL 9000. SAL was used as a reference system for HAL; when the twin computer fails to predict any communications failure, Bowman and Poole begin to suspect HAL's reliability. SAL is clearly "female", and features similar camera plates like HAL, but the "eye" is blue. Dr. Chandra has a private terminal to SAL's mainframe in his office, and his influence causes her to develop a slightly Indian accent (2010: Odyssey Two). In the film version, SAL is voiced by Candice Bergen, who was credited only under a pseudonym (as "Olga Mallsnerd").
In the French edition of the movie 2010: Odyssey Two, SAL9000 sports the voice of a young woman, quickly answering Dr. Chandra in the dialogue. This, much more than the original movie, gives the feeling of an artificial person responding to her creator with blind, absolute, immediate obedience.
Before the Soviet-USA mission to retrieve Discovery, Chandra uses her for a simulation of the possible effects that a prolonged "sleep" might have induced in HAL, and the project is code-named Phoenix. When Chandra taunts SAL to guess the reason for the name, her display of culture makes it clear that SAL has access to some form of encyclopedic knowledge database, or has it built in with the rest of her programs. This is an interesting parallel to the Cyc project, which is real and aims to give an AI a base reference knowledge to understand the world, thus taking decisions and interacting with humans more efficiently than by different kind of approaches. As an interesting reference to the strong belief in the project, at least in the Eighties, another fictionary thinking machine, KARR (Knight Rider), is seen sporting a rudimentary version of such a database.
In the book 2010, we learn that another ground-based HAL machine undergoes the same psychosis that HAL does when forced to experience the same contradiction. In fandom a third unit exists, named PAL 9000.
[edit] The future of computing
When the film 2001 was first screened in 1968, the year 2001 was a long way away and a computer like HAL seemed quite plausible at the time. In the mid-1960s computer scientists were generally optimistic that within a generation or two we would have machines that could pass the Turing test.
Importantly, HAL is shown playing a game of chess — in 1968, the greatest breakthrough in computer chess playing was "hexapawn", as detailed in an edition of that year's Scientific American. A full chess algorithm was still considered science fiction, but within the realms of possibility, and even then an open ended possibility. No-one could predict that within as little as five to ten years computers would be successfully challenging grand masters, but at that time for HAL to play chess, and win was seminal in driving the future direction of computer game playing AI.
However, as 2001 approached it became clear that 2001's predictions in computer technology were far fetched. Natural language, Lip reading, planning and plain common sense in computers were still the stuff of science fiction.
However, 2001 also failed to predict many of the advances that would take place in computing by 2001. The film's creators felt that as computers got more powerful, they would get bigger and bigger - partly true, Blue Gene, a modern supercomputer is very large. HAL occupies much of the living area on Discovery. A thin laptop or notepad computer is alluded to in a few scenes where they are used to relay news broadcasts from Earth. Also, the film's portrayal of computer graphics are elegant, though minimalist compared to the graphics and visualization techniques available in 2001.
[edit] HAL's filmic eye
HAL's red "eye" was a Cinerama 160 degree Fairchild-Curtis wide angle lens. The lens served as both a prop for the eye seen on film as well as the actual camera lens used for filming HAL's point of view shots. Stanley Kubrick chose to use the Fairchild-Curtis lens after attending the 1964 World's Fair and seeing To the Moon and Beyond, a film produced with the lens and projected onto a planetarium-like dome.
[edit] Popular culture
[edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Text excerpts from HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Audio soundbites from 2001: A Space Odyssey
- HAL's Legacy, on-line ebook (mostly full-text) of the printed version edited by David G. Stork, MIT Press, 1997, ISBN 0-262-69211-2, a collection of essays on HAL
- HAL's Legacy, An Interview with Arthur C. Clarke.
- the case for HAL's sanity by Clay Waldrop
- "2001" fills the theater at HAL 9000's "birthday" in 1997 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Hal 9000 Memory Test using episodic memory algorithm
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| Films | 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) | 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) |
| Novels | 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) | 2010: Odyssey Two (1982) | 2061: Odyssey Three (1987) | 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997) |
| Comics | 2001: A Space Odyssey (1976) |
| Short stories | "The Sentinel" (1952) |
| Characters | HAL 9000 | David Bowman | Dr. Chandra | Walter Curnow | Heywood Floyd | Frank Poole |
| Vehicles | Discovery One | EVA Pod | Leonov |
| Cast | Keir Dullea | John Lithgow | Gary Lockwood | Helen Mirren | Douglas Rain | Roy Scheider | William Sylvester |
| Crew/creators | Arthur C. Clarke | Peter Hyams | Jack Kirby | Stanley Kubrick |
| Interpretations | Interpretations of 2001: A Space Odyssey |
| Music | Alex North's 2001: A Space Odyssey |
