HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) is a fictional character in
Arthur C. Clarke's Space
Odyssey saga. The novels, along with two films, begin with 2001: A Space
Odyssey, released in 1968. It was ranked #13 on a list of greatest film villains of all on the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains.
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. In the book, 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.
HAL is never visualised as a single entity. He is, however, portrayed with a soft voice and a conversational manner. This is
in contrast to the human astronauts, who speak in terse monotone, as do all other actors in the film.
In translations from the original English, HAL might have another name: for example,
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".
Although it is often conjectured that the name HAL was based on a one letter shift from
the name IBM, this has been denied by both Clarke and 2001 director Stanley Kubrick. In 2010: Odyssey Two, Clarke even
goes so far as to have a reporter pose the question to Dr. Chandra, who replies, "Utter
nonsense! [...] I thought that by now every intelligent person knew that H-A-L is derived from Heuristic
ALgorithmic".[2][3]
HAL's history
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 decides to kill the
astronauts in order to protect and continue "his" programmed directives. HAL proceeds to kill Poole while Poole is repairing the
ship, and most of the rest of the crew while they are in suspended animation by
disabling their life support systems.
A view of HAL 9000's Central Core in the
Discovery.
Realizing what has occurred, Bowman then shuts down the machine. HAL's central core is depicted as a crawlspace 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, HAL's consciousness degrades. HAL regurgitates material that was programmed into
him early in his memory, 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 recognized scene in the film. 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, which
had been kept secret from the crew and not been intended to be played until the ship entered Jupiter orbit.
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. Prior to
leaving Earth, Dr. Chandra has also had a discussion with HAL's twin, the SAL9000 (see [1] and section below). 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, directly from White House
officials, required him to keep the discovery of the Monolith TMA-1 a secret for reasons of
national security. This contradiction created a "Hofstadter-Moebius loop," reducing HAL to paranoia. This paranoia produced a creative 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), whereas in the novel
he is told right at 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 10000.
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.
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.
3001: The Final Odyssey introduced 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 as well as life on Europa would be destroyed as humanity had the potential to be
dangerous and the Europans had stagnated, according to the monolith's reasoning.
Influences
The scene in which HAL's consciousness degrades was inspired by Clarke's memory of a speech
synthesis demonstration by physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr, who used an
IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech. Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer vocoder recreated the song "Daisy Bell", with musical accompaniment from
Max Mathews.[4]
Characterization
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; it is implied that HAL's programmed objective to ensure
the mission's success — at any cost — vaguely resembled the human drive for a purposeful existence, while the prospect of being
shut down resembled the fear of death. When these factors began to contradict his primary objective of preserving the ship's
crew, his malfunction was the result.
- 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.
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," a combination of the surname of Bergen's husband,
director Louis Malle and that of Mortimer Snerd, one
of her father Edgar Bergen's famous puppet characters).
In the French edition of the movie 2010: Odyssey Two, SAL 9000 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, 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 asks SAL to guess the reason for the name Phoenix she understands that the
there are many possible meanings, and her first guess that it refers to the
tutor of Achilles is not what he had in mind; 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.
2010 reveals that another ground-based HAL machine undergoes the same psychopathy
that HAL does when forced to experience the same contradiction.
The future of computing
HAL's capabilities, like all the technology in 2001, was based on the speculation of respected scientists.
Marvin Minsky, director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and one of the most influential
researchers in the field, was an advisor on the film.[5]
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. For example, AI pioneer Herbert Simon had predicted in
1965 that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."[6]
As 2001 approached though, it became clear that 2001's predictions in computer technology were too far fetched.
Natural language, lip reading,
planning, and commonsense reasoning in computers were simply still elements 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.
HAL's eye and point of view
HAL's POV shots were created with a Cinerama 160 degree Fairchild-Curtis wide angle camera lens. This Fairchild-Curtis wide angle lens was not used
as the eye in the Hal 9000 prop seen in film, because this Fairchild-Curtis wide angle lens is about 8" in diameter, while the
Hal 9000 prop eye is about 3" in diameter. Stanley Kubrick chose to use the
Fairchild-Curtis lens to shoot the Hal 9000 POV shots 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.
See also
References
External links
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