HAL 9000
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HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) is a fictional 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.
Though HAL is never visualised as a single entity, he is portrayed with a mellifluous British accent, 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.
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".
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[2] 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 decides to kill the astronauts, in order to protect and continue the directive he is programmed with. 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, 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, HAL's consciousness degrades. He 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 recognised 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.
[edit] 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.[1]
[edit] 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.
- 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, 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.
[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.
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 Europians had stagnated, according to the monoliths reasoning.
[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, 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 psychosis that HAL does when forced to experience the same contradiction.
[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.[citation needed]
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.
However, as 2001 approached 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.
[edit] The HAL 9000 prop filmic eye and the HAL 9000 Point of View Camera Lens
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.
[edit] Popular culture
Douglas Rain has steadfastly refused to recreate the HAL 9000 voice outside of any 2001/2010 context, feeling a very protective obligation to the integrity of the computer's character. However, he parodies his famous performance in the Woody Allen comedy Sleeper by providing the voice of the computer as well as some of the robot butlers.
Among the many references to HAL that exist in popular culture, HAL was "featured" in a short commercial by Apple Computer in the year 1999 in which he asks "You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave?" (because Macs would not undergo the same potential problems with the "Year 2000 problem" that many other computer systems were expected to have).
Asteroid number 9000, discovered by E. L. G. Bowell in 1981, was eventually given the name "Hal".
Hal being taught "Daisy Bell" is a reference to another famous computer - a demonstration at Bell Labs where a computer, being fed punch cards, first repeats part of Hamlet's Soliloquy, and then sings "Daisy Bell". (An MP3 of the test is available from various sources online.)
The robot from the film I, Robot sounds much like HAL.
HBO's Six Feet Under parodies HAL-9000 in a scene between Fisher brothers Nate and David (to whom Nate refers to as "Dave" during the scene in HAL 9000 signature-like tone) with David obviously unamused by Nate's impersonation of HAL 9000.
In the Disney's One Saturday Morning program "Recess" when the school's old clock breaks down, Third Street School replaces it with a new digital clock and security system named SAL that is very similar to HAL. SAL's monitoring interface is nearly identical to HAL's and during the episode a number of incidents occur that hearken back to 2001.
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- In one scene, a student is locked out of the school and he says 'Open the doors SAL' to which the computer responds 'I can't do that, Gus'
- When the kids decide to deactivate SAL, they hide in a piece of jungle gym equipment and SAL determines their plans by reading their lips, just like HAL does in the movie.
In 2001, episode 1 season 13 of The Simpsons.The family home obtains an upgrade, the Ultrahouse 3000, a computer that will do everything for them. Everything is going great until the house falls in love with Marge and tries killing Homer. Homer can stop Ultrahouse by removing memory units from it's CPU (like in Discovery). Ultrahouse 3000 was voiced by Pierce Brosnan
- The Futurama episode Love and Rocket contains many references and similarities to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey:
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- The ship's camera interface is similar to HAL 9000.
- The ship says "I'm afraid I can't do that, Leela" and the quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey: "I'm afraid I can't do that Dave".
- Hal 9000 and the ship share murderous intentions towards their masters.
- The scene in which Leela, Fry, and Bender enclose themselves in a shower, which is the only place Planet Express Ship cannot hear them, to discuss Planet Express Ship's fate of disconnection is a reference to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 2001, the characters Dave Bowman and Frank Poole go into an EVA pod, which is the only place HAL 9000 cannot hear them, to figure out how to go about HAL 9000's disconnection. Aditionally, in this scene, the Planet Express Ship states that she wishes she could read lips, in order to discover what the crew is planning. This is also a reference to 2001, but in 2001, HAL 9000 could indeed read lips, and as a result, knew what Bowman and Poole had planned.
- Leela reads a print out of the ship´s status after the battle on a punch card. In the film astronaut Dave Bowman requested a punch card hard copy of the AE-35 antenna malfunction.
- The scene where Fry and Leela shut down the ship is very similar to the shutdown of HAL.
- Tapirs were featured in the beginning of the movie in the "Dawn of Man" sequence.
- The song "Daisy Bell", sung by Bender, was sung by HAL 9000 after Dave started to remove his circuit boards. It was one of the first things he was taught after he was brought online.
- The romantic glow is a reference to Lucifer, from 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
- In Red vs. Blue season 1, episode 9, Shelia the tank is hit by an airstrike. She then procedes to say "I'm scared Dave. Will I dream? Daisy... Daaaaiisyyyyyy..."
[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
| The Space Odyssey series | |
|---|---|
| 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" (written 1948, first published 1951 as "Sentinel of Eternity") |
| Characters | HAL 9000 | David Bowman | Dr. Chandra | Walter Curnow | Heywood Floyd | Frank Poole |
| Vehicles | Discovery One | EVA Pod | Leonov | Orion III | Aries Ib | Space Station V |
| Locations | Earth | Moon | Clavius Base | Tycho | Jupiter | Europa | Io | Ganymede | Saturn | Iapetus |
| Cast | Keir Dullea | John Lithgow | Gary Lockwood | Helen Mirren | Douglas Rain | Roy Scheider | William Sylvester | Leonard Rossiter | Margaret Tyzack |
| 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 |
