HAL 9000 is a fictional character in Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series. The primary
antagonist of 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL is a sentient computer that controls the systems
of the Discovery One spacecraft and interacts with the ship's astronaut crew. HAL's physical
form is not depicted, though it is visually represented as a red television camera eye
located on equipment panels throughout the ship. HAL 9000 is voiced by Douglas Rain in
the two film adaptations of the Space Odyssey series. HAL speaks in a soft, calm voice and
a conversational manner, in contrast to the crewmen, David Bowman and Frank Poole, who
speak tersely and with little emotional inflection. In the context of the series, HAL became operational
on 12 January 1997 at the HAL Laboratories in Urbana, Illinois as production number 3;
in the film 2001, the activation year was 1992 and 1991 in earlier screenplays. In addition
to maintaining the Discovery One spacecraft systems during the interplanetary mission
to Jupiter, HAL is capable of speech, speech recognition, facial recognition, natural language
processing, lip reading, art appreciation, interpreting and reproducing emotional behaviours,
automated reasoning, and playing chess.
Appearances 2001: A Space Odyssey
HAL became operational in Urbana, Illinois, at the HAL Plant. The film says this occurred
in 1992, while the book gives 1997 as HAL's birth year. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL
begins to malfunction in subtle ways and, as a result, the decision is made to shut
down HAL in order to prevent more serious malfunctions. The sequence of events and manner
in which HAL is shut down differs between the novel and film versions of the story.
In the film, 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 attempt to conceal what they are saying, but are unaware that
HAL can read their lips. Faced with the prospect of disconnection, HAL decides to kill the
astronauts in order to protect and continue its programmed directives. HAL proceeds to
kill Poole while he is repairing the ship. When Bowman goes to rescue Poole, HAL locks
him out of the ship, then disconnects the life support systems of the other hibernating
crew members, killing them in their sleep. Dave circumvents HAL's control, entering the
ship by manually opening an emergency airlock with his pod's clamps, and ejecting himself
out of the pod using the explosive bolts in its door.
The novel explains that HAL is unable to resolve a conflict between his general mission to
relay information accurately and orders specific to the mission requiring that he withhold
from Bowman and Poole the true purpose of the mission. With the crew dead, he reasons,
he would not need to lie to them. He fabricates the failure of the AE-35 unit so that their
deaths would appear accidental. In the novel, the orders to disconnect HAL
come from Dave and Frank's superiors on Earth. After Frank is killed while attempting to
repair the communications antenna as his oxygen gets disconnected and gets pushed out to deep
space, Dave begins to revive his hibernating crewmates, but is foiled when HAL vents the
ship's atmosphere into the vacuum of space, killing the awakening crew members and almost
killing Dave. Dave is only narrowly saved when he finds his way to an emergency chamber
which has its own oxygen supply and a spare space suit inside.
In both versions, Bowman then proceeds to shut down the machine. In the film, 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. 2010: Odyssey Two
In the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two, 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. Like HAL, SAL was created by Dr. Chandra.
Whereas HAL was characterised as being "male", SAL is characterised as being "female".
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 Dr. Heywood Floyd at the National Council on Astronautics,
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.
In essence: if the crew were dead, he would no longer have to keep the information secret.
The alien intelligence initiates a terraforming scheme, placing 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 the film are nominally
the same, with a few exceptions. First, in contradiction to the book, Heywood Floyd is
absolved of responsibility for HAL's condition; it is asserted that the decision to program
HAL with information concerning TMA-1 came directly from the White House. 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, 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.
The basic reboot sequence initiated by Dr. Chandra in the movie 2010 is voiced from HAL
as, "HELLO_DOCTOR_NAME_CONTINUE_ YESTERDAY_TOMORROW". Prior to Leonov's return to Earth, Curnow
tells Floyd that Dr. Chandra has begun designing HAL 10000.
In 2061: Odyssey Three it is revealed that Chandra died on the journey back to Earth.
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 Frank Poole was introduced to the merged form 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.
Concept and creation Clarke noted that the film 2001 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. Early drafts of Clarke's story called the computer
Socrates, with another draft giving the computer a female personality called Athena. This name
was later used in Clarke and Stephen Baxter's A Time Odyssey novel series.
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' 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.
During rehearsals Kubrick asked Stefanie Powers to supply the voice of HAL 9000 while searching
for a suitably androgynous voice so the actors had something to react to. On the set, British
actor Nigel Davenport played HAL. When it came to dubbing HAL in post-production, Kubrick
had originally cast Martin Balsam, but as he felt Balsam "just sounded a little bit
too colloquially American", he was replaced with Douglas Rain, who "had the kind of bland
mid-Atlantic accent we felt was right for the part." Rain was only handed HAL's lines
instead of the full script, and recorded them across a day and a half.
HAL's point of view shots were created with a Cinerama 160-degree Fairchild-Curtis wide-angle
lens. This lens is about 8 inches in diameter, while HAL's prop eye lens is about 3 inches
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 fisheye lens that would fit onto his shooting
camera, and this was the only lens at the time that would work. The HAL 9000 faceplate,
lens less, was discovered in a junk shop in Paddington, London, in the early 1970s by
Chris Randall. Research revealed that the original lens was a Nikon Nikkor 8mm F8. This
was found along with the key to HAL's Brain Room. Both items were purchased for ten shillings
The collection was sold at a Christies auction in 2010 for £17,500.
Origin of name 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, 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 explicitly mentioned in the film 2001, as are many other real companies. IBM
is given fictional credit as being the manufacturer of the Pan Am Clipper's computer, and the
IBM logo can be seen in the center of the cockpit's instrument panel. In addition, the
IBM logo is shown on the lower arm keypad on Poole's space suit in the scene where he
space walks to replace the antenna unit, and may possibly be shown reflected on Bowman's
face when he is inside the pod on his way to retrieve the body of Poole.
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. HAL has inspired some designs of intelligent
computers in some science fiction films, like "Mother" in Alien, VIKI in I, Robot, and AUTO
in Wall-E. HAL's capabilities, like all the technology
in 2001, were based on the speculation of respected scientists. Marvin Minsky, director
of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and one of the most
influential researchers in the field, was an adviser on the film set. In the mid-1960s,
many computer scientists in the field of artificial intelligence were optimistic that machines
with HAL's capabilities would exist within a few decades. For example, AI pioneer Herbert
A. Simon at Carnegie Mellon University, had predicted in 1965 that "machines will be capable,
within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do", the overarching premise being that
the issue was one of computational speed rather than principle.
Cultural impact HAL is listed as the 13th-greatest film villain
in the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains. See also
List of fictional computers Colossus
ILLIAC National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Poole versus HAL 9000 Jipi and the Paranoid Chip
References
External links The HAL 9000 Simulator TheHAL9000.com - Including
screensavers, wallpapers and movie inspired flash interfaces.
Text excerpts from HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey
Audio soundbites from 2001: A Space Odyssey HAL's Legacy, on-line ebook 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. Talk like HAL Campaign to promote talking
like HAL on his birthday of January 12, includes audio sound files