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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 , written by Arthur C. Clarke in 1968. HAL is an artificial intelligence, the sentient on-board computer of the spaceship Discovery that eventually runs rampant. 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) [link] at [HAL Communications Corp.] 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.

A view of HAL 9000's Main Console in the centrifuge of Discovery.
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A view of HAL 9000's Main Console in the centrifuge of Discovery.

In other languages than English, HAL might have another name: for instance, in the French version of , 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).

Contents

HAL's history

[Spoiler warningSpoiler warning]: Plot and/or ending details follow.

HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey

In , 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.[Bell Labs: Where "HAL" First Spoke (Bell Labs Speech Synthesis website)] 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.

A view of HAL 9000's Brain Room in the Discovery.
Enlarge
A view of HAL 9000's Brain Room in the Discovery.

The book differs from the film in a number of details, e.g.

  1. the book explains far more explicitly the causes of HAL's behavior
  2. 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.

HAL in 2010: Odyssey Two

In the sequel , 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.

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 , Heywood Floyd is surprised to encounter HAL, now stored alongside Dave Bowman in the Europa monolith.

In ', 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 '. 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.

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 (). In the film version, SAL is voiced by Candice Bergen, who was credited only under a pseudonym (as "Olga Mallsnerd").

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, code-named Project 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.

In the book 2010, we learn that another ground-based HAL machine undergoes the same psychosis that HAL does.

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 do "just about anything humans could do".

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. 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.

Trivia

Cited references

See also

External links

The Space Odyssey'' series
Films ' (1968) | ' (1984)
Novels ' (1968) | ' (1982) | ' (1987) | ' (1997)
Comics (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

 

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