| HAL 9000 | |
|---|---|
| Space Odyssey character | |
HAL's iconic camera eye |
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| First appearance | 2001: A Space Odyssey |
| Last appearance | 2010 |
| Created by | Arthur C. Clarke |
| Voiced by | Douglas Rain |
| Information | |
| Nickname(s) | HAL |
| Species | Artificial intelligence |
| Gender | N/A (Male vocals) |
| Relatives | SAL 9000 |
HAL 9000 is the primary antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction Space Odyssey saga. HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) is an artificial intelligence that interacts with the astronaut crew of the Discovery One spacecraft, usually represented as a red television-camera eye found throughout the ship. HAL 9000 (Douglas Rain) speaks in a soft voice and a conversational manner, in contrast to the crewmen, David Bowman and Frank Poole, who speak tersely and with little emotional inflection. HAL became operational on 12 January 1997, at the HAL Laboratories in Urbana, Illinois, as production number 3; in the film 2001 the activation year was 1992, and 1991 in earlier screenplays. [1] In addition to maintaining the Discovery One spacecraft systems during the interplanetary mission to Jupiter, HAL is capable of speech, speech recognition, facial recognition, natural language processing, lip reading, art appreciation, interpreting and reproducing emotional behaviours, reasoning, and playing Chess.
HAL is listed as the 13th-greatest film villain in the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains. In the French-language version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL's name is CARL, Cerveau Analytique de Recherche et de Liaison (Analytic Brain for Research and Communication), however, the television camera eye plates read "HAL 9000".
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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.[1] In 2010: Odyssey Two, Clarke speaks through the character of Dr. Chandra (he originally spoke through Dr. Floyd until Chandra was awoken), who characterized this idea as: "[u]tter nonsense! [...] I thought that by now every intelligent person knew that H-A-L is derived from Heuristic ALgorithmic".[2][3]
Clarke more directly addressed this issue in his book The Lost Worlds of 2001:[4]
As is clearly stated in the novel (Chapter 16), HAL stands for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. However, about once a week some character spots the fact that HAL is one letter ahead of IBM, and promptly assumes that Stanley and I were taking a crack at the estimable institution ... As it happened, IBM had given us a good deal of help, so we were quite embarrassed by this, and would have changed the name had we spotted the coincidence.
Also, IBM is explicitly mentioned in the film 2001, as are many other real companies. IBM is given fictional credit as being the manufacturer of the Pan Am Clipper's computer, and the IBM logo can be seen in the center of the cockpit's instrument panel.
Clarke has stated that each book of the series takes place in its own universe and, apart from its basic concepts, has no consistent relationship with one another. Therefore, the HAL 9000 in each book is a different, yet similar, incarnation of the same character.
HAL became operational in Urbana, Illinois at the HAL Plant at the University of Illinois, where the ILLIAC computers were assembled. The film states that this occurred in 1992, while the book gives 1997 as HAL's birthyear.[5] In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL begins to malfunction in subtle ways, and as a result, the decision is made to shut HAL down in order to prevent more serious malfunctions. The sequence of events and manner in which HAL is shut down differs between the novel and film versions of the story.
In the film, astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole consider disconnecting HAL's cognitive circuits when he appears to be mistaken in reporting the presence of a fault in the spacecraft's communications antenna. They attempt to conceal what they are saying, 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 its programmed directives. HAL proceeds to kill Poole while he is repairing the ship. When Bowman goes to rescue Poole, he is locked out of the ship, and HAL proceeds to disconnect the life support systems of the other hibernating crew members, killing them in their sleep. Dave manages to force his way back onto the ship by jumping through space and prying open an emergency airlock, outside of HAL's control.
The novel explains that HAL is unable to resolve a conflict between his general mission to relay information accurately and orders specific to the mission requiring that he withhold from Bowman and Poole the true purpose of the mission. With the crew dead, he reasons, he would not need to be lying to them. He fabricates the failure of the AE-35 unit so that their deaths would appear accidental.
In the novel, the orders to disconnect HAL come from Dave and Frank's superiors on Earth. After Frank is killed while attempting to repair the communications antenna, Dave begins to revive his hibernating crewmates, but is foiled when HAL vents the ship's atmosphere into the vacuum of space, killing the awakening crew members and almost killing Dave. Dave is only narrowly saved when he finds his way to an emergency chamber which has its own oxygen supply and a spare space suit inside.
In both versions, Bowman then proceeds to shut down the machine. In the film, 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. When HAL's logic is completely gone, he begins singing the song "Daisy Bell" (in actuality, the first song sung by a computer).[6][7] 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.
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 SAL 9000.
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 Dr. Heywood Floyd at the National Council on Astronautics, 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. Therefore, 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. In essence: if the crew were dead, he would no longer have to keep the information secret.
The alien intelligence controlling the monoliths have grandiose plans for Jupiter, plans which place the Leonov, and everybody in it, 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 willingly sacrifices himself so that the astronauts may escape safely. 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 the film are nominally the same, with a few exceptions. First, in contradiction to the book (and events described in both book and film versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey), Heywood Floyd is absolved of responsibility for HAL's condition; it is asserted that the decision to program HAL with information concerning TMA-1 came directly from the White House. In the film, HAL functions normally after being reactivated, while in the book it is revealed that his mind was damaged during the shutdown, forcing him to begin communication 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 would not initiate the engine-burn necessary to get the Leonov back home), whereas in the novel he is told at the outset. However, in both cases the suspense comes from the question of what HAL will do when he knows that he may be destroyed by his actions.
The basic reboot sequence initiated by Dr. Chandra in the movie 2010 is voiced from HAL as, "HELLO_DOCTOR_NAME_CONTINUE_ YESTERDAY_TOMMOROW" (which in the novel 2010 is a longer sequence).
Prior to Leonov's return to Earth, Curnow tells Floyd that Dr. Chandra has begun designing HAL 10000. 2061: Odyssey Three indicated that Chandra died on the journey back to Earth, defeating the point.
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 merging into one entity called "Halman" after Bowman rescued HAL from the dying Discovery One spaceship towards the end of 2010: Odyssey Two.
Clarke noted that the film 2001 was criticized for not having any characters, except for HAL and that a great deal of the establishing story on Earth was cut from the film (and even from Clarke's novel).[8] Early drafts of Clarke's story called the computer Socrates (a preferred name to Autonomous Mobile Explorer–5), with another draft giving the computer a female personality called Athena.[4] This name was later used in Clarke and Stephen Baxter's Time Odyssey Series.
The earliest draft depicted Socrates as a roughly humanoid robot, and is introduced as overseeing Project Morpheus, which studied prolonged hibernation in preparation for long term space flight. As a demonstration to Senator Floyd, Socrates's designer, Dr. Bruno Forster, asks Socrates to turn off the oxygen to hibernating subjects Kaminski and Whitehead, which Socrates refuses, citing Asimov's First Law of Robotics.[9]
In a later version, Poole is killed outside the spacecraft, triggering the need for Bowman to revive Whitehead. The revival does not go according to plan, and after briefly awakening, Whitehead dies. Athena announces "All systems of Poole now No–Go. It will be necessary to replace him with a spare unit."[10] After this, Bowman decides to go out in a pod and retrieve the antenna, which is moving away from the ship. Athena will not originally let him go, citing a "Directive 15", but eventually relents.[11]
As revealed in her recent biography, during development Kubrick asked Stephanie Powers to supply the voice of HAL 9000 while searching for a suitably androgynous voice so the actors had something to react to.
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.[12]
HAL has inspired some designs of intelligent computers in some sci fi films, like 'Mother' (MU-TH-R 182 model 2.1 terabyte AI Mainframe) in Alien, VIKI in I, Robot, and AUTO in Wall-E.
HAL 9000 has at least one Earthbound twin, SAL 9000. SAL makes its first (and only) appearance in the novel (and subsequent film version) 2010.
Before the Soviet–USA mission to retrieve Discovery, Chandra uses SAL for a simulation of the possible effects that a prolonged "sleep" (disconnection) 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 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.
SAL is clearly "female" and features camera plates similar to HAL, though the "eye" is blue instead of red. 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).
2010 reveals that another ground-based HAL machine undergoes the same psychopathy that HAL does when forced to experience the same contradiction.
During the Discovery mission (in the 2001 novel and film), when Bowman and Poole have problems with HAL, an Earthbound Mission Control technician reports to them on the use of two unnamed sibling HAL computers on earth as reference simulators. When the sibling computers fail to predict any communications failure, Bowman and Poole begin to doubt HAL's reliability. It may be speculated that one of these sibling computers is SAL.
It is not stated whether "SAL" is just a nickname or an acronym similar to "HAL".
HAL's capabilities, like all the technology in 2001, were 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 adviser on the film set.[13] In the mid-1960s, many computer scientists in the field of AI were optimistic that machines with HAL's capabilities would exist within a few decades. For example, AI pioneer Herbert Simon at Carnegie Mellon University, had predicted in 1965 that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do",[14] the overarching premise being that the issue was one of computational speed (which was predicted to increase) rather than principle. Notable dissenters existed however, including John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus, and the latter in particular has been proven largely correct about "what computers can't do".
As 2001 approached, it became clear that the film's depiction of computer technology was too optimistic. Capabilities such as natural language processing, lip reading, and commonsense reasoning on the part of computers were still science fiction, although some advances in natural language processing can be seen in voice recognition and synthesis software on computers and smartphones.
HAL's POV shots were created with a Cinerama 160-degree Fairchild-Curtis wide-angle lens. This lens is about 8 inches (20 cm) in diameter, while HAL's prop eye lens is about 3 inches (7.6 cm) in diameter. Stanley Kubrick chose to use the large Fairchild-Curtis lens to shoot the HAL 9000 POV shots because he needed a wide-angle fisheye lens that would fit onto his shooting camera, and this was the only lens at the time that would work. The HAL 9000 faceplate, less lens, was discovered in a junk shop in Paddington, London, in the early seventies by Chris Randall. Research revealed that the original lens was a Nikon Nikkor 8mm F8. This was found along with the key to HAL's Brain Room. Both items were purchased for ten shillings (£0.50) The collection was sold at a Christies auction in 2010 for a great deal more.
In the films the many computer screens that surround HAL's eye display everything from a chess game to mathematical calculations to instrument schematics. Interspersed in the cycle of various routine displays are three-letter codes that represent what topic of data will be displayed next.
These are the definitions of the various codes:
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