HAL 9000

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.

HAL is an artificial intelligence, the sapient 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) 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 stark contrast to the human astronauts, who speak in terse monotone, as do all other actors in the film. HAL is therefore portrayed as the most, or only, feeling being in the film, a trait which encourages audience bonding with the character and emphasises the ironic overtones of a culture where the most human entity is a machine.

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HAL's iconic camera eye.

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".

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.

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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. 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.

Characterization

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; 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.
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.

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 (first guessing the tutor of Achilles), 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

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.

As 2001 approached though, it became clear that 2001's predictions in computer technology were too far fetched. Natural language, lip reading, planning, and plain common sense 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.

Importantly, HAL is shown playing a game of chess (see Poole - HAL 9000); 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.

HAL's eye and point of view

HAL's Point of View 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

• Computers in fiction
• Frank Poole
• Arthur C. Clarke

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
• The Hal Project featuring the Hal 9000 screensaver.