What was hal

You and I have little difficulty sorting through the many pronunciations to arrive at the proper word, yet the task remains quite problematical for computers. Establishing the meaning of words is vastly more complicated. Take the sentence "Time flies like an arrow. The lack of commercial speech recognition applications and the continued proliferation of keyboards are a testament to just how hard speech recognition remains.

While artificial intelligence has made some progress, the speed has been disappointing at best. So we may have to wait a long time before we meet HAL. For all our engineering prowess, we have yet to unlock the mystery of human intelligence. Will we ever? When all his logic is gone, he begins to sing the song " Daisy Bell. Heywood R. Floyd pre-recorded about the Tycho Monolith before their departure, and the real purpose of the Discovery I's mission.

Hal is a major protagonist in this film and is revived by Dr. Chandra once the Leonov reaches Jupiter, and prepped for his new mission of piloting the Discovery One back to earth. However, due a change of plans caused by TMA-2's disappearance, the crew of the Leonov is forced to leave the Discovery and Hal behind. Rudenko characters characters characters characters. Popular pages. Floyd The Leonov. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? HAL Edit source History Talk 1.

I am a HAL computer. I'm afraid I can't do that. That being said, Stanley Kubrick's films have a reputation for two things: being great and making absolutely no sense on the first watch. And in both of these respects, relative to his other films, A Space Odyssey is on a completely different level. In order to finally satisfy our curiosity about what the heck is going on with HAL, we rewatched the film, dug through old interviews, and even read through Arthur C.

Clarke's original novel. Along the way, we not only found answers to most of our questions, but we also discovered all sorts of interesting behind-the-scenes stories about HAL came to be. We promise that this super dense article will put your mind to its fullest possible use, which is all that any conscious entity can ever hope to do. Part of HAL's hauntingly enigmatic nature might come from the unique circumstances of his creation. And we're talking in the real world here, where his backstory is pretty complex.

Typically, a novel is released, and then a few years later, a film adaptation is made, but with A Space Odyssey , the novel and the movie were developed concurrently and released around the same time, with novelist Arthur C. Clarke pictured above and director Stanley Kubrick collaborating directly during the early stages of both projects.

Because of this, HAL has two creators with different sensibilities and worldviews. The melded visions of these two men help contribute to the feeling that HAL is a multifaceted character with an internal life that's difficult to fully get a handle on. As cool as this is, it turns out it's just a coincidence. Clarke writes, "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.

Stanley Kubrick initially thought that he wanted HAL to sound just like a normal human, without a trace of the uncanny. To this end, the first actor he cast in the part was Martin Balsam Psycho , 12 Angry Men , All the President's Men , who recorded all of HAL's lines, based on Kubrick's direction, in a highly emotional and non-robotic manner. But soon after, Kubrick realized it just wasn't right. As Kubrick said , "We had some difficulty deciding exactly what HAL should sound like, and Marty just sounded a little bit too colloquially American.

To find a new HAL, Kubrick sent out set assistant Benn Reyes to find an actor with a voice that would be "neither patronizing, nor is it intimidating, nor is it pompous, overly dramatic or actorish. Despite this, it is interesting. In the end, Kubrick settled on Douglas Rain, who had previously narrated a documentary called Universe , which Kubrick apparently liked a great deal. He was initially considering using Rain as the narrator for the A Space Odyssey , but once he decided to not include any narration in the film, Kubrick realized that Rain's eerily calm delivery and difficult to place " bland mid-Atlantic accent " were exactly what he was looking for in a voice for HAL.

Yet it turns out that Rain, like everyone, did come from a specific place. And in his case, that was Canada. Perhaps this common perception that Canadian accents are difficult to place for Americans is why they manage to get work so often as news anchors in the United States.

Regardless, Rain's voice was perfect for the eerily calm AI. Now comes the million dollar question. Why does the seemingly benevolent HAL suddenly turn murderous? On the Genealogy of Morality, First Essay. Does HAL mean it? Could he mean it? The cost of being the sort of being that could mean it is the chance that he might not mean it. But is HAL even remotely possible? Is Clarke helping himself here to more than we should allow him? Could something like HAL — a conscious, computer-bodied intelligent agent — be brought into existence by any history of design, construction, training, learning, and activity?

The extreme cases at both poles are impossible, for relatively boring reasons. The finished product could thus be captured in some number of terabytes of information. So, in principle, the information that fixes the design of all those chips and hard-wired connections and configures all the RAM and ROM could be created by hand.

There is no finite bit-string, however long, that is officially off-limits to human authorship. So whatever moral standing the latter deserved should belong to the former as well. The main point of giving HAL a humanoid past is to give him the world knowledge required to be a moral agent — a necessary modicum of understanding or empathy about the human condition. After all, among the people we know, many have moral responsibility in spite of their obtuse inability to imagine themselves into the predicaments of others.

When do we exculpate people? We should look carefully at the answers to this question, because HAL shows signs of fitting into one or another of the exculpatory categories, even though he is a conscious agent. First, we exculpate people who are insane. Might HAL have gone insane? Dave: Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions. He has something very much like emotions — enough like emotions, one may imagine, to mimic the pathologies of human emotional breakdown.

Deep Blue, basking in the strictly limited search space of chess, can handle its real-time decision making without any emotional crutches.

HAL may, then, have suffered from some emotional imbalance similar to those that lead human beings astray. Whether it was the result of some sudden trauma — a blown fuse, a dislodged connector, a microchip disordered by cosmic rays — or of some gradual drift into emotional misalignment provoked by the stresses of the mission — confirming such a diagnosis should justify a verdict of diminished responsibility for HAL, just as it does in cases of human malfeasance.

Is HAL like a cult member? At what point does benign, responsibility-enhancing training of human students become malign, responsibility-diminishing brainwashing? And what is it to be able to think for ourselves?