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HAL 9000 is a fictional computer in Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey saga. The novels, along with two films, begin with 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968. It was ranked #13 on a list of greatest film villains of all time on the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains.
HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer) 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.
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Quotations
:HAL: I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
:HAL: I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours.
:HAL: Pod Bay is decompressed. All doors are secure. You are free to open pod bay doors.
:HAL: I am the H.A.L 9000 you may call me Hal.
:HAL: I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
:HAL: after receiving instructions from Dave Bowman All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there. Use them together. Use them in peace.
Encyclopedia
HAL 9000 is a fictional computer in Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey saga. The novels, along with two films, begin with 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968. It was ranked #13 on a list of greatest film villains of all time on the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains.
HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer) 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) at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois. His first instructor was Dr. Chandra (Mr. Langley in the movie). 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, reasoning, and chess, in addition to maintaining all systems on an interplanetary voyage.
HAL is never visualized 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 the French language version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL's name is given as "CARL", for Cerveau Analytique de Recherche et de Liaison ("Analytic Research and Communication Brain"). The camera plates, however, 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 speaks through the character of Dr. Chandra, 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".
Clarke more directly addressed this issue in his book The Lost Worlds of 2001:
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 indeed in the movie 2001, as are many other real companies. IBM is given fictional credit as being the manufacturer of the Pan Am Clipper's computer. The IBM logo can be seen in the center of the cockpit's instrument panel.
HAL's history
HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, 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 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 he is repairing the ship, and disable the life support systems of the crew being held in suspended animation.
Realizing what has occurred, Bowman 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. When HAL's logic is completely gone, he begins singing the song "Daisy Bell". 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 Jovian orbit. However, in the novel version, David Bowman has to call mission control and wait 2 or 3 hours for a reply.
HAL in 2010: Odyssey Two
In the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two (Also known as "2010: The Year We Make Contact"), 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 (see also the 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. 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, as nobody remained from whom to keep it.
The alien intelligences 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 film are nominally the same, with a few exceptions. 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.
Prior to Leonovs 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, making the point moot.
The session of keyboard/screen interaction between HAL and Dr. Chandra has a taste of a natural language understanding computer program like 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 merging into one entity called "Halman" after Bowman rescued HAL from the dying Discovery One spaceship towards the end of 2010: Odyssey Two.
Development
Clarke noted that the film 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). 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.
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.
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." 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.
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 film differs from the novel in a number of details, including:
- 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 conflict with 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 it attempts to kill him by opening the ship's airlocks.
SAL 9000
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 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.
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, when Bowman and Poole are having problems with HAL, an Earthbound Mission Control technician reports to them on the use of a "twin" 9000 computer on which simulations are being run to determine a course of action. Some readers/viewers have suspected that this computer is SAL, and that it 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.
It should be noted that SAL is not mentioned by name in the film 2001. The novel never mentions the name SAL, and further implies that Mission Control had more than one 9000-series computer available. Given the acronym behind HAL's name (Heuristic ALgorithmic), it is not clear if "SAL" is just a nickname, or if the name is a different acronym.
The future of computing
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.
When the film 2001 was first screened in 1968, the year 2001 was considered a distant year 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, machines would be able to pass the Turing test. For example, AI pioneer Herbert Simon had predicted in 1965 that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do".
As 2001 approached, it became clear that the film's predictions for computer technology were premature. Capabilities such as natural language processing, lip reading, planning, and commonsense reasoning on the part of computers were still science fiction concepts.
The film's creators guessed that as computers got more powerful, they would increase in size—partly true: Blue Gene, a modern IBM supercomputer, is very large. HAL occupies much of the living area on Discovery (most likely just for the "brain" of the AI). Thin laptops or notepad computers are alluded to in a few scenes where they are used to view news broadcasts from Earth. Also, the film's portrayal of computer graphics is elegant.
The HAL 9000 prop eye lens and Hal Point of View lens
HAL's POV shots were created with a Cinerama 160 degree Fairchild-Curtis wide angle camera lens. This lens is about 8" in diameter, while HAL's prop eye lens is about 3" 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 Fish-Eye lens that would fit onto his shooting camera, and this was the only lens at the time that would work.
Cultural references
Mystery Science Theatre 3000, Mitchell!, in which Joel escapes from the Satellite of Love, Gypsy watches Dr. Forrester and TV's Frank have a conversation in profile, much like HAL watching Bowman and Poole in the pod. This scene is complete with increasingly more extreme close-ups of Gypsy's eye as she watches them talk. However, her interpretation of the conversation is incorrect, believing that they intend to kill Joel.
South Park, "Trapper Keeper", Kyle must disable the creature Cartman becomes from within its core, which resembles the core of HAL 9000. Kyle even tells Cartman what he is doing and Cartman responds, "I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Kyle," which parodies HAL. This is not the only episode that has parodied 2001. "Bebe's Boobs Destroy Society" features a parody of the moment when the apes learn to use bones as weapons, and "The Tooth Fairy Tats 2000" parodies a famous fetus image from 2001.
The Simpsons, where Ultrahouse (HAL), voiced by Pierce Brosnan, is installed in the house as an automatic butler/maid/cook/cleaner; falls in love with Marge, and attempts to kill Homer. Another production that spoofed the 9000 was Futurama, when a new personality chip was installed in the space ship. The episode features numerous references to the film.
Muppets Tonight, an episode of "Pigs in Space" featured a HAL-esque computer called the "AL 1995 Plus Tax". However, to Miss Piggy's frustration, he takes a long time to calculate the simplest addition problem (during which the theme music from Jeopardy! would play), even pausing to say, "I'm sorry, but by 'plus', did you mean 'make bigger'?"
- There is a similarity between HAL and
Portals GLaDOS, who also "died on a song". This connection was observed in Randall Munroe's xkcd webcomic in January 2008. Also in Portal, the numerous security cameras seen throughout the game bear an almost striking resemblance to HAL's observation eye, but can also be taken off some walls via portals, accompanied by a sentence, "Vital testing apparatus destroyed." The computer (GLaDOS) is malfunctioning (supposedly), and tries to kill the protagonist from the game. The battle with GLaDOS at the end is also similar to Dave's dismantlement of HAL. Finally, several control panels in the final maintenance areas resemble the walls of CPU chips in HAL's main computer core. GLaDOS's turret minions also have HAL like eyes.
- In the video game Grand Theft Auto III, a computer can be seen in Joey's garage with "HAL 9000" written on it.
- In the video game Silhouette Mirage, the villain Hal is simultaneously named in homage to HAL 9000 and the Biblical Armageddon. (Har Megiddo in Hebrew)
- In the Israeli satirical South Park-style animation series MK 22, HAL is featured as "HAL-LELUYA", the brain of the AI Robot "Robo-Rabbi".
- In the Stargate: Atlantis episode, "The Intruder", a similar shot of the iconic HAL Camera, is seen as an alien virus takes control of the Tau'ri spacecraft Daedalus The virus portrays many of the same characteristics as HAL; most notably, the virus itself is an AI.
- Norwegian cartoonist Mads Eriksen made a comic strip featuring Hal 9000 as a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke. The strip can be found at .
- HAL 9000 was also used on Recess as the SAL 3000. The school installs SAL in an attempt to replace the old school clock. However, SAL deems the teachers unfit, and decides to take his own hand in teaching the students. At the end of the episode, they go through the vents, and then manually shut down SAL, however, at the end of the episode, the principal is looking at a SAL 4000 to install since it's coming out in a year.
- In the film Independence Day, when David Levinson opens up his laptop onboard the captured alien spaceship, HAL's interface camera is shown and the laptop says in HAL's voice, "Good Morning, Dave."
- In the video game Destroy All Humans 2, occasionally a levitated hippie will say "Open the pod bay doors, HAL."
- The British TV series Spaced, with Simon Pegg, featured a refrigerator called CAL 900, an obvious reference to HAL 9000.
- An episode of the television anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex includes a scene where an AI (called a "Tachikoma") reads the lips of two of the main characters, who it suspects are concerned about the AI becoming too autonomous, while they have sequestered themselves in a room where they cannot be eavesdropped upon. Although this meatspace conversation is not about the Tachikomas, it is a decoy, and there is simultaneously a parallel cyberspace conversation where it is decided to remove the AIs from active duty.
- In the film Robots, Bigweld starts singing "Daisy Bell" before Rodney fixes his brain, an obvious reference to HAL.
- In the video game Xenogears on the Sony PlayStation, the minds of a group of deceased humans known as the Gazel Ministry are stored as data on a computer system called the SOL-9000, an obvious homage to HAL and SAL.
- In one episode of The Animaniacs set in outer space, the rocket computer called Al reads lips, attempts to turn off the life support, and while being dismantled starts to hum. (This robot is later revealed to be a cartoon version of Al Gore.)
- In the 2008 Pixar animated film WALL-E, the main villain and starship Axioms Autopilot ("Auto") has a glowing red camera, a low electronic voice and a hidden directive - deliberately reminiscent of HAL. WALL-E's pet cockroach is also named Hal.
- In the Mark Coppos-directed Apple Macintosh commercial "HAL and the Year 2000" a machine similar to HAL 9000 talks to Dave about what fictionally happened to the world when the year 2000 hit (Y2K Problem).
- The name "PAL 9000" also appears in the television series Flying Rhino Junior High, as a computer system with a humanoid avatar, devised by Marcus to run the school.
- HAL's voice is used on Roger Waters' album In the Flesh - Live during the song "Perfect Sense". Kubrick refused to allow HAL's voice to be used during "Perfect Sense" on its original inclusion on the album Amused to Death, reportedly because Waters refused Kubrick usage of some of the music from Pink Floyd's album Atom Heart Mother in his 1971 film A Clockwork Orange. However, Waters used the dialogue sample after Kubrick's death.
- On the October 13, 2008 episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert calls the HAL 9000 and uses audio clips from the film in their conversation.
- Eagle Eye - a top secret super-computer called ARIIA is similar to HAL. Further allusion to 2001 exists in evading ARIIA's "ears" and the actions required to shut it down after it's gained too much control.
- In the second expansion pack for the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft engineers are able to craft an item called an "Overcharged Capacitor". The icon for the item bears a striking resemblance to HAL's red camera lens (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=39682).
- In the manga Majin Tantei Nogami Neuro, an AI designed by a criminal created a name for itself, and that name was HAL.
- In a commercial for Jared Jewelry, a GPS system sounding almost identical to HAL quotes the line "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave"
- In The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Jimmy's computer, VOX, has a scanner that looks very similar to HAL's camera eye.
Apollo 13 air-to-ground transcript
Before disaster struck, the specter of HAL 9000 was raised in an amusing exchange between mission control and Apollo 13's moon-bound crew. From NASA's Apollo 13 Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription:
CC Capsule communicator (CAP COMM)
CDR Commander James A. (Jim) Lovell Jr.
CMP Command module pilot John L. Swigert Jr.
LEB Lower equipment bay
DSKY Display and keyboard
00 11 20 14 CC Apollo 13, Houston.
00 11 20 18 CDR Go ahead, Houston.
00 11 20 19 CC Okay. Looking at our computations back here, we show you about 55 450 and going out rapidly now.
00 11 20 33 CDR Well, Hal might be a little bit off.
00 11 20 36 CC Okay.
00 11 20 37 CMP We have a sign underneath our LEB DSKY that "my name is Hal."
00 11 20 45 CC I can't imagine how that got there. Just remember, you have to be nice to Hal.
00 11 20 55 CMP We will.
See also
External links
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- , 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
- ,
An Interview with Arthur C. Clarke. at HAL 9000's "birthday" in 1997 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign featuring the Hal 9000 screensaver.
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