The Original Supercomputer, in the annals of Hollywood history, had a name; “Hal”, and was introduced to us in “2001: a Space Odyssey”, way back in 1968.
HAL(for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer, no less) was a masterwork of the third computer breakthrough. These seemed to occur at intervals of twenty years, and the thought that another one was now imminent already worried a great many people.
I thought I would post some of these articles & ops concerning the ‘Original Supercomputer’;“HAL”, being the namesake program this forum is based on is the Ultra Hal Assistant.
“IN THE ANNALS OF MOTION PICTURE HISTORY, the film
"2001: A Space Odyssey" holds a special place. Watching the film, the viewer feels that he is being treated to nothing less than a capsulized tale of human civilization, from Day One to the present, and even into the future. The film is panoramic, and of epic proportions. The music is breathtaking, and the plot follows a spaceship that crosses the universe, searching for the source of life itself.
Millions of people have seen this film, and though "2001" is outwardly science fiction, every viewer senses an important message. Something is being said about life, the universe, and reality in general, and the message seems to be one of enormous consequence. What is actually being said, however, is strangely elusive.
In the late 1960's, when
"2001" came out (it opened Jan, 1, 1968), it left its audiences so awestruck, so mystified, and so curious, most who went to see it once, went back to see it again and again, hoping that they would be able to decipher it.”
Yet the initial reaction to Stanley Kubrick`s
"2001: A Space Odyssey" was outright hostility when the film premiered in New York. (This was in the days before nationwide releases, when films played in exclusive engagements for months before gradually moving into neighborhood theatres.)
A daring experiment in unconventional narrative inspired by Clarke's short story
"The Sentinel," 2001 is a visual tone poem (barely 40 minutes of dialogue in a 139-minute film) that charts a phenomenal history of human evolution.
”2001: A Space Odyssey” is a countdown to tomorrow, a road map to human destiny, a quest for the infinite. It is a dazzling, Academy Award®-winning visual achievement, a compelling drama of man vs. machine, a stunning meld of music and motion. It may be the masterwork of director
Stanley Kubrick (who co-wrote the screenplay with
Arthur C. Clarke)…and it will likely excite, inspire and enthrall for generations.
“2001 was a box-office hit when it premiered in 1968.
Hippies would go to the front row of the movie theatre and lie on the floor as its ‘cosmic light show’ swept over them. Reaction to this film by the moviegoing masses was extreme: it was either loved or hated by critics and laymen alike. There was no middle ground.” (Re:
www.modemac.com/2001/2001-a.html)
"Alone among science fiction movies, 2001 is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe." --
Roger Ebert The film's popularity has not waned over the years, although it is no longer used for "tripping”. Today, 2001 stands as a triumph of science fiction on the silver screen. Other films have tried to imitate its style and its vision, such as
“Planet Of The Apes” and
“Silent Running”, but none have come close.-(Re:
http://www.2001principle.net/2002.htm )
I have seen this film several times over, and I never fail to come away inspired, and filled with wonderful questions, answer's and possibilities surrounding its structure, its form as a visual tone poem, its music, its acting, the surreal depiction of aliens, w/o in fact showing them, and its honest desire to present the viewer with a means to viscerally feel and think through a picture. You can see why Clarke, and Kubrick and his team took four years to put this together from his original short story, “The Sentinel”. Nearly everything in this picture is exquisite from the depiction of special effects, space flight in three dimensional rather than two dimensional form, the metaphorical storyline combining the relationship between humanity and its tools, to the depiction of evolution and the possibility of aliens seeding solar systems with intelligence, to the ingenious finale that forces you to think deeply, and thoughtfully about humanity and what makes something alien-a french King Louis XVI style drawing room was just genius!
Arthur C. Clarke's novel,
'2001: A Space Odyssey', is the most obvious book to turn to for anyone looking for the answers to the movie - but the novel is not the final authority on the film. Clarke's novel is based upon an earlier version of the movie screenplay; he and Kubrick co-wrote the story while the movie was in production, and Kubrick made many changes to the film after the novel was finished and before the movie was released. Therefore, there are passages within the novel that do not take place in the movie at all, and likewise there are elements of the film that are not found in the book. For instance, in the novel the spaceship Discovery travels to the planet Saturn and its moon Japetus, while in the movie the destination is Jupiter.
Hal (the computer) opens the airlock doors and lets all of the air out of the spaceship
Discovery while
Dave Bowman is still aboard in the novel; in the movie he lures Dave into outer space and refuses to let him back into the ship. The idea of letting the air out of Discovery had been included in the screenplay to the movie (which is why we see
Dave wearing a spacesuit and helmet during his attack on
Hal's memory banks), but it was later cut.
HAL 9000 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.
HAL is an artificial intelligence, the sentient on-board computer of the spaceship Discovery.
HAL is usually represented only as his television camera red "eyes" that are an omnipresent feature throughout much of the Discovery spaceship.
HAL9000 Overview:
The
HAL9000 series computer represents a startling breakthrough in computer design. Our first
HAL9000 became fully operational on January 12, 1997 at our
HAL plant in
Urbana, IL , exceeding all expectations for advanced independent operation. It has been designated by the
National Council on Astronautics to be installed on board the
USS Discovery now under construction which is scheduled to embark on an unprecedented exploration mission of our solar system, planned for early in the next century.
The
HAL9000 unit will assume duties that range over the entire operational aspects of
USS Discovery's flight and operations. Functioning literally as a member of the crew, the unit will be capable of independent thinking and problem solving for all contingencies that make space flight such a hazardous undertaking. Ever sentient,
HAL9000 will assure that the crew of Discovery will be safe from many of the dangers that have claimed the lives of earlier spacefarers. The ability to constantly update the status of on board ship systems will guarantee worry-free operations and safety for the crew.
HAL9000's ability to interact verbally and think independently are the hallmarks of this revolutionary computer system. We anticipate this will be one of the most exciting exploration missions ever undertaken.
Re:
http://mental-pictures.com/hal9000/home.html The name HAL
Many people believe the name was taken from IBM (because H precedes I, A precedes B, and L precedes M alphabetically).
Arthur C. Clarke denied such wordplay (even having one of his characters deny it in the sequel
2010: Odyssey Two), saying that the name actually means Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. Many find this denial unconvincing. (Note that the HAL 9000 nameplate is modeled on similar nameplates for IBM mainframe computers).
It should be pointed out that most visual designs in any movie based on a book are designed by individuals other than the author. The physical similarities may have been intentional, but more likely reflected an idea of what people expected a large computer to look like.
Also, in computer terms, HAL is short for Hardware Abstraction Layer. In this case,
HAL refers to a programming layer. The HAL allows programmers to write programs that interface with computer hardware on an abstract level instead of at a detailed technical level. This way programs can be written in more general terms when it comes to hardware interfaces.
The
HAL computer may have been the inspiration for the HAL/S computer language (Re:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL/S ) used to program the NASA Space Shuttle's (Re:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle ) computers.
HAL is sometimes compared with chess-playing computer
Deep Blue (Re:
http://www.who2.com/deepblue.html )
HAL 9000 was inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in 2003.
British actor
Nigel Davenport and American actor
Martin Balsam both recorded HAL’s dialogue before Kubrick eventually settled on Canadian Shakespearean actor
Douglas Rain as the computer’s calm, rational voice.
*********
HAL has had a lasting effect not only on fiction, but also on the real world. It has inspired astronauts, scientists and philosophers. Scientists ask how its capabilities can be duplicated and philosophers have asked whether HAL was responsible for the murders of the astronauts. All of us ask whether we want to create intelligent machines that may someday endanger us (Re: 'I, Robot').
It has been said that the
HAL 9000 computer is the most empathetic character in
'2001: A Space Odyssey.' Even though his "nervous breakdown" turns him into a murderer, his eventual "death" by disconnection is sadder than any other death in the movie. But almost everyone who has seen the movie has wondered: what exactly caused HAL's breakdown?
It is only in retrospect that the HAL's breakdown can be seen as the inevitable result of a programming conflict. HAL is responsible for the safety of the space ship Discovery and its crew, and for the success of the mission. Through his pre-launch programming, HAL has been also been entrusted with knowledge of the true purpose of the mission to Jupiter (which the human crew thinks is merely to explore the Jupiter system, but is actually to follow the "burglar alarm" signal from the monolith on the moon). This continues the theme of information being withheld about this monolith's discovery; earlier in the movie, we see space bureaucrat
Dr. Heywood Floyd traveling to the moon merely to orchestrate the secrecy campaign. But HAL has also been ordered not to reveal this purpose to the human crew -- to keep from adding to the already considerable psychological stress they will face during the months that they spend in isolation on their space mission. That these goals are logically irreconcilable and ultimately unachievable is gradually revealed by HAL's interaction with the crew during the course of the Jupiter mission. The plot of this part of the movie can be thought of as a game, similar to a game of chess, played out between HAL and the human crew: each trying to figure out how much the other knows, to anticipate and block their opponent's next move. In the dialog of a series of key scenes we see how this game, which depends on more than pure logic, leads
HAL to irreconcilable conflicts and subsequent breakdown, with tragic results.
Scene #1: The BBC Interview
Here we see the astronauts viewing the earth broadcast of a video interview with the BBC that they had done a day or two earlier .
In the final segment, a short file film done several months before the
Discovery mission, plays and a Dr. Bruno Forester, Director of the HAL Corporations General Robotics Division introduces the HAL9000 Project Director, Dr. Siva Chandra, who gives the crowd their first in person glimpse of a HAL9000 computer which will provide the Discovery with the latest advances in automated control and artificial intelligence support. We hear HAL tell the BBC interviewer:
"No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake, or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."HAL is already coming close to lying here, since his withholding the true purpose of the mission could be considered distorting information.
HAL:
" ... my mission responsibilities range over the entire operation of the ship, so I am constantly occupied."Actually, since the uneventful months of the mission, or even a second-long gap in a conversation with a human, are practically endless to a computer,
HAL is doomed to spend what must seem like forever stuck in logical loops with no resolution. Boredom is as much as, or more of, a risk for
HAL as it is for the human crew.
In this and subsequent scenes of daily life aboard the space ship, we see that indeed HAL acts more human than the crew members. Not only was HAL programmed to emulate human emotions, but the astronauts were no doubt selected for their ability to carry out months of tedious duty with machine-like reliability; they were chosen for this mission because they were especially boring people.
Keir Dullea plays Dr.
David A. Bowman,
Jr., Pilot and Flight Mission Commander. Dr.
Bowman was previously the commander of the Polaris-1 XE manned mission to
Mars and the first man to set foot on the Red Planet.
Gary Lockwood, who achieved some SciFi fan recognition as 'Gary Mitchell' in the 1966 pilot episode
"Where No Man Has Gone Before" of the original
Star Trek TV series, plays Dr.
Frank K. Poole, Co-Pilot and Deputy Flight Commander. Dr.
Poole was previously Director of Cornell University's Underwater Laboratory at Bimini and is an authority on hibernation systems.
The mission forces both
HAL and the humans to relate on the same intellectual level -- expecting a programmed machine to deal with the complexities and ambiguities of the human psyche -- contributes to
HAL's breakdown.
Scene #2: The Chess Game
HAL:
"Queen to Bishop Three. Bishop takes Queen. Knight takes Bishop. Mate." Here we see HAL playing an actual game of chess with
Frank Poole. If you look at the chess game on the board, you will see that even though he wins
HAL has made a mistake: he incorrectly identifies one of the moves on the board (
He should have said "Queen to Bishop Six."This is the first clue, albeit a very subtle one which no one but a chess master like
Kubrick would ever notice, that something is wrong with
HAL.
See also:
http://www.chess-poster.com/great_games/gg_hal9000.htm Scene #3: Bowman's Sketches
HAL:
"Well, forgive me for being so inquisitive, but during the past few weeks I've wondered whether you might be having some second thoughts about the mission ... I know I've never completely freed myself of the suspicion that there are some extremely odd things about this mission ... certainly no one could have been unaware of the very strange stories floating around before we left. Rumors about something being dug up on the moon ..." Bowman:
"You're working up your crew psychology report." Bowman's mistake; actually
HAL is trying to get enough information to know if he has succeeded in obeying his programming by keeping his secret, but recognizes that since he does not know everything that
Bowman knows, he cannot say for sure. And he can't continue to question
Bowman without giving away the secret. This is an endless loop that causes HAL's first serious breakdown.
HAL: [after one of those pauses which must seem an eternity to a computer]
"Of course I am ... [The first of many lies; then he changes the subject]
Just a moment ... just a moment ... I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go a hundred percent failure within seventy-two hours." Why does
HAL flag a non-existent failure in this piece of communications equipment? There are several possible reasons. Does he intend to sever communications with earth to keep the astronauts from prematurely learning the purpose of the mission? Is he just trying to get both astronauts outside the spaceship where he can easily kill them? Is he just sending them on a wild goose chase to buy time? Or is
HAL's action truly irrational?
Scene #4: The AE35 Unit Check-out
Bowman:
"Well, HAL, I'm damned if I can find anything wrong with it." He is in essence calling HAL a liar.
HAL:
"Yes, it's puzzling. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this before. I would recommend that we put the unit back in operation, and let it fail ... we can certainly afford to be out of communication for the short time it will take to replace it." HAL has bought more time but he most know that the unit will NOT fail, and his error will then be discovered.
Scene #5: Conferring With Mission Control
Mission Control:
"... our preliminary findings indicate that your on-board Niner-Triple-Zero computer is in error predicting the fault ... this conclusion is based on results from our twin Niner-Triple-Zero computer." The twin computer can correctly analyze the AE35 unit because it does not have the secrecy programming dilemma.
Bowman [to HAL]:
"How would you account for this discrepancy between you and the twin 9000?" HAL:
"... it can only be attributable to human error ..." HAL is actually right here; it was humans that programmed him to lie.
At this point in the novel by
Arthur C. Clarke, mission control admits that they have identified the programming conflict, and recommend disconnecting
HAL and operating the ship by remote control from the twin 9000 computer on Earth; in the movie
HAL has to figure out that the humans will inevitably come to this conclusion.
Poole:
"Listen, HAL -- there's never been any instance at all of a computer error occurring in a 9000 series, has there?" HAL:
"None whatsoever, Frank. The 9000 series has a perfect operational record." Poole:
"Well, or course I know all the wonderful achievements of the 9000 series, but are you certain there's never been any case of even the most insignificant computer error?"In pressing his line of questioning , Poole makes two mistakes here that seal his fate: He words the question sarcastically;
HAL has been programmed to respond as if he has human emotions. And he words it so vaguely (how do you define
"insignificant"? Withholding the true purpose of the mission would have to meet that criterion). If
HAL had been programmed with fuzzy logic, he might have made it past this dilemma. At this point HAL's nervous breakdown continues and he decides to protect his secret at all costs -- even if it conflicts with his programming to protect the crew.
HAL:
"None whatsoever, Frank." Scene #6: Read My Lips
Poole:
"Look, Dave -- let's say we put the unit back and it doesn't fail. That would pretty well wrap it up as far as HAL was concerned, wouldn't it? ... I don't think we'd have any alternatives ... I wouldn't see how we'd have any choice but disconnection." Bowman:
" ... no 9000 computer has ever been disconnected." Poole: "Well, no 9000 computer has ever fouled up before."
Bowman: "That's not what I mean."
Poole:
"Huh?" Bowman: "Well, I'm not so sure what he'd think about it ..."
Poole has misunderstood Bowman's point:
they may be putting themselves in danger by attempting to shut down HAL. At this point we can't hear the rest of their conversation, but we see that
HAL can: he is reading their lips. It is at this point that
HAL's breakdown is complete and makes his final logical, but tragic, decision: to protect his secret, he must kill the astronauts, and we go into the movie's intermission with a feeling of dreadful expectation.
Scene #7: "Open The Pod Bay Doors, HAL"
HAL [to Bowman, after killing the four other astronauts]:
"This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it." Bowman:
"I don't know what you're talking about, HAL." HAL:
"I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen." Bowman does not understand what HAL means, but does not appear to be at all surprised by HAL's revelation with regards to his admission of lip reading and this is as close as
HAL himself will ever get to explaining his actions: to carry out his programming, he must also prevent anyone from turning him off, since the true purpose of the mission would then be lost. Logical on computer terms, but not on human terms: of course, if
HAL kills all the astronauts, there will be no one left for him to reveal his secret to at the preprogrammed time, when the ship enters orbit around Jupiter. Bowman may not understand everything, but it is obvious to him that
HAL must die.
This also brings up the question: did the murdered hibernating astronauts know the true purpose of the mission? One clue that they did know:
HAL earlier made a comment that they were trained separately from Bowman and Poole. Again, the novel clarifies that they did know -- but if that is the case, why did
HAL kill them? After all, he wouldn't have been programmed to keep the secret from them. He kills them simply because if they are revived from suspended animation, they will help
Bowman disconnect
HAL. In the novel,
Bowman does attempt to revive one of the astronauts to replace
Poole, but is foiled at the last moment by
HAL.
Scene #8: The Secret Revealed
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 until he is merely a computer.
Dr. Heywood Floyd [on computer monitor, after Bowman has turned off
HAL's higher logic functions ... Check Mate]:
"This is a pre-recorded briefing, made prior to your departure, and which, for security reasons of the highest importance, has been known on board during the mission only by your HAL 9000 computer. ... eighteen months ago, the first evidence of intelligent life off the Earth was discovered ... buried forty feet below the lunar surface ... a single, very powerful radio emission, aimed at Jupiter ..." Again, this is as close as the movie comes to explaining everything that has gone before. The wording misleadingly implies that the astronauts in suspended animation were not in on the secret. But they were, and once we know that, we can see that the explanation given,
"security reasons of the highest importance," is also misleading; the true purpose of the secrecy was psychological protection of the crew.
So, in he end, we can't help but feel sorry for
HAL. After all, he was only trying to do as he was told.
In the game of chess, no observer, nor even the players themselves, can understand all of the thought processes that transpire in the course of a match. Therefore, while my analysis is probably as complete as possible given the information in the movie, other questions and possibilities will always remain. Also, this explanation may not even agree with the one that was (unfortunately) spelled out in the sequel
2010: Odyssey Two -- a movie that did not realize that mystery is an essential part of the
2001 experience.
After writing the above, I read the book
'HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer As Dream And Reality', edited by David G. Stork and published to coincide with the fictional date of HAL's birth as given in the novel: January 12, 1997. The book describes the state of the art in Artificial Intelligence in real computers, as compared with HAL's capabilities; there are chapters on fault tolerance, speech synthesis, speech recognition, image processing, speechreading, and computer ethics. These discussions include richly detailed analysis of HAL's behavior from many perspectives, including his programming and how it leads to his breakdown. One chapter reproduces the entire chess game between HAL and Poole -- actually a real match that was played in Hamburg in 1913!
Although the authors explore many possibilities for HAL's architecture and operation (including speculation that HAL's core may actually be a human brain!), they only briefly consider one possibility that has occurred to me: that HAL may actually be a lot less intelligent than he appears; many of his responses may be at least partially "canned," similar to the recorded voice on present-day automated telephone-answering systems. This seems particularly evident during the BBC interview; HAL's answers seem curiously disconnected from the questions, especially the response that begins
"Let me put it this way ..." One author admits that HAL's refusal
"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" could be an automatic response if one assumes a "storytelling" programming model, and that such a computer would be even possible with today's technology. But then the author dismisses the notion; why would HAL's creators have programmed him with paranoid responses? That line of reasoning is belied by the frustratingly generic and misleadingly personal error messages of today's PC's; one should not attribute to deliberate malicious intent what could be the inadvertent result of technological limitations. Indeed, many modern PC owners (
Arthur C. Clarke included!) recognize the humorous irony inherent in this situation by setting up their computer to deliver that very line of HAL's dialog when instructed to do anything contrary to programming! Likewise, in the chapter on speechreading it is never considered that HAL didn't actually read the astronauts' lips, but, through a mix of extrapolation and paranoia, "guessed" that they had to be discussing his disconnection. After all, HAL merely says
"I could see your lips move" -- and Bowman does not appear to be surprised, but perhaps HAL was intentionally misleading Bowman (and the audience) to infer that he was truly speechreading.
The authors point out many other inconsistencies in HAL's operation, but also recognize that much of this can be attributed to dramatic license rather than actual failure to understanding the technology. One outright error occurs in the chapter on speech recognition by computers, when a phrase of dialog from the movie ("Pod 3BA") is used as an example. But in this case the author himself has misheard the line -- Bowman actually says "[Prepare]
B Pod for E.V.A. [Extra-Vehicular Activity]" -- negating the whole point of how easy it is for humans to understand the phrase in context!
Overall, this book is filled with interesting information and intelligent analysis, and anyone who wants to know how close we are to building an actual HAL will find it fascinating.
Re:
http://pages.prodigy.net/pam.orman/joe2001/Joe2001HAL.html (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml )
Hope you all enjoyed this RETROspective....of our exposure, ala fictionally, to the 1st Supercomputer introduced to our culture.
P.S. If you're a curious HAL9000 buff like me, check out The
HAL Corporation website @:
http://www.mental-pictures.com/hal9000/and download their cool HAL9000 screensaver @:
http://www.mental-pictures.com/hal9000/HAL1.0/PC_ScreenSaver/hal9000 There's also a cool HAL9000 Desktop theme at:
http://www.fontempire.com/cgi-bin/preview.pl/themes/hal9000b.zip that adds a a set of icons and HAL9000 sound files to your PC.
The
"You have a message." from HAL is your Windows mail notification. Along with Ultra Hal, you have the ultimate "ultra HAL' PC.
Here's a complete list of
2001: A Space Odyssey sound files for download:
http://www.palantir.net/2001/sounds.htmlPeace
