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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 "eyes" that are an omnipresent feature of the Discovery spaceship. The voice of HAL 9000 was performed by the actor Douglas Rain. HAL became operational on January 12, 1997 (1992 in the movie) at the H.A.L. Laboratory in Urbana, Illinois, and was created by Dr. Chandra. In the 2001 film, HAL is depicted as being capable not only of speech recognition and natural language understanding, but also lip reading.
A view of
HAL 9000's Brain Room in
DiscoveryIn other languages than English, HAL might have another name: for instance, in the French version of 2001 A Space Odyssey, his name is stated as being CARL, for Cerveau Analytique de Recherche et de Liaison ("Analytic Research and Communication Brain"). However, the famous camera plates still read "HAL 9000".
HAL's history
HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, after HAL appears to be mistaken about a fault in the spacecraft, astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole consider disconnecting his cognitive circuits. They believe that HAL cannot hear them, but are unaware
that HAL is capable of lip reading. Faced with the prospect of disconnection, HAL proceeds to kill Frank Poole while he is repairing the ship as well as the other members of the crew who are in suspended animation. Realizing what has occurred, astronaut David Bowman then shuts the machine down. HAL's central core is depicted as a room full of brightly lit computer modules mounted in arrays from which they can be inserted or removed. Bowman shuts down HAL by removing modules from service one by one; as he does so, we witness HAL's consciousness degrading.
HAL 9000's characteristic console
The book differs from the movie in a number of details. First, the book explains far more explicitly the causes of HAL's behavior. Secondly, in the movie, 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, opening the ship's airlocks.
HAL in 2010: Odyssey Two
In the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two, HAL is restarted by his creator, Dr. Chandra, who arrives on the Soviet spaceship Alexei Leonov. Dr. Chandra discovers that HAL's crisis was caused by a programming contradiction: he was constructed for "the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment", yet his orders required him to keep the discovery of the monolith TMA-1 a secret. This contradiction created a "Hofstadter-Moebius loop", reducing HAL to paranoia.
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 noncorporeal being, so that David Bowman's avatar may have a companion.
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.
In 3001: The Final Odyssey, the emulated forms of Bowman and HAL help Frank Poole infect the monolith with a computer virus; as the primitive life in Jupiter's clouds were sacrificed to make the sun to warm Europa, it is feared that humanity would be sacrificed for the new life at Europa.
SAL 9000
HAL 9000 has at least one Earthbound twin, SAL 9000. SAL (or possibly another "twin niner-triple-zero") 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, making her sound like an Indian princess returning from college in Cambridge (2010: Odyssey Two).
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, code-named Project Phoenix. When Dr Chandra taunts SAL to guess the reason for the name, her display of culture makes it clear that SAL has access to some form of encyclopedic knowledge database.
In the book 2010, we learn that another ground-based HAL machine undergoes the same psychosis that HAL does.
HAL wordplay
It has been noted that the letters of the name HAL are the immediate alphabetic predecessors of IBM, the familiar initials of the major computer company International Business Machines, and it has been frequently suggested that this is how the name HAL originated. Arthur C. Clarke has consistently denied such wordplay, saying that had he noticed the coincidence he would have chosen a different name for the computer. Many find this denial unconvincing. Like most conspiracy theories, proof either way is impossible.
In 2010: Odyssey Two, the character Dr. Chandra, HAL's creator, states that the name means "Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer". When Clarke devised this version of the name is unclear.
It has been pointed out that the HAL 9000 nameplate is modelled on similar nameplates for IBM mainframe computers. However, 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 are more likely to reflect an idea of what people expected a large computer to look like than to be a direct reference.
The initialism HAL has also now become real-world computer terminology, standing for "hardware abstraction layer".
Trivia
The HAL computer may have been the inspiration for the HAL/S computer language used to program the NASA Space Shuttle's computers.
HAL 9000 was inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in 2003.
See also
External links
de:HAL 9000
ja:HAL9000
sv:HAL 9000
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