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'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 '', released in 1968. It was ranked #13 on a list of greatest film villains of all on the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains.
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. In the book, 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.
HAL is never visualised as a single entity. He is, however, portrayed with a soft voice and a conversational manner. This is in contrast to the human astronauts, who speak in terse monotone, as do all other actors in the film.
In translations from the original English, HAL might have another name: for example, 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".
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 '', 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 ''H''euristic ''AL''gorithmic".[2][3]
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 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.
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.
In the sequel '', 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 SAL9000 (see [1] and
section below).
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.
In '', Heywood Floyd is surprised to encounter HAL, now stored alongside Dave Bowman in the Europa monolith.
'' 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 ''. 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.
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.[4]
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. When these factors began to contradict his primary objective of preserving the ship's crew, his malfunction was the result.
# 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 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," 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 '', 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 Phoenix she understands that the 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.
''2010'' reveals that another ground-based HAL machine undergoes the same psychopathy that HAL does when forced to experience the same contradiction.
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 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.
★ Computers in fiction
★ Frank Poole
★ Arthur C. Clarke
1. Meanings: The Search for Meaning in 2001 George D. DeMet
2. Dawn of HAL: History of Artificial Intelligence - Dr. Arthur C. Clarke Interview Dr. David G. Stork
3. What do the letters HAL stand for and is there a connection with IBM?
4. Bell Labs: Where "HAL" First Spoke (Bell Labs Speech Synthesis website)
★ 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.
★ A wallpaper by Mauricio Fndz. Rosiñol
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. In the book, 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.
HAL is never visualised as a single entity. He is, however, portrayed with a soft voice and a conversational manner. This is in contrast to the human astronauts, who speak in terse monotone, as do all other actors in the film.
HAL's iconic camera eye.
In translations from the original English, HAL might have another name: for example, 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".
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 '', 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 ''H''euristic ''AL''gorithmic".[2][3]
HAL's history
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 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.
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 '', 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 SAL9000 (see [1] and
section below).
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''
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 '', Heywood Floyd is surprised to encounter HAL, now stored alongside Dave Bowman in the Europa monolith.
'' 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 ''. 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.[4]
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. When these factors began to contradict his primary objective of preserving the ship's crew, his malfunction was the result.
# 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 (''). 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 '', 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 Phoenix she understands that the 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.
''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
References
1. Meanings: The Search for Meaning in 2001 George D. DeMet
2. Dawn of HAL: History of Artificial Intelligence - Dr. Arthur C. Clarke Interview Dr. David G. Stork
3. What do the letters HAL stand for and is there a connection with IBM?
4. Bell Labs: Where "HAL" First Spoke (Bell Labs Speech Synthesis website)
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.
★ A wallpaper by Mauricio Fndz. Rosiñol
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