![]() ![]() Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reallty is edited by a long time HAL fan, David Stork, chief scientist at the Ricoh California Research Centre. It has plenty of useful links, elegant design, and pictures and sound files from the film. But probably the best birthday present of all was a provocative anthology of essays published this week by MIT Press, and a corresponding Java based Web site (at http //with eight of the book's chapters in full. ![]() HAL's "birthday" yesterday was celebrated by scientists around the world, in numerous articles, including Wired's cover story. Clarke the optimist, the writer and the man who first came up with the idea of communications satellites. 2001 seemed like the perfect collaboration: between Stanley Kubrick the film maker, the dark pessimist with a love of science, and Arthur C. He (yes, HAL was somehow male) is the film's most complex personality, and apparently far more emotional than the robot like astronauts. Unlike previous machines, which sounded, well, robotic, HAL spoke in a comforting, mellow, expressive, human sounding voice. It's an old joke among voice recognition researchers ("wreck a nice beach" is one computer's guess when it heard the words "recognise speech").īut the most famous computer in science fiction, HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, seemed to have overcome these problems. No wonder Microsoft has nicknamed its research team developing new voice recognition systems the "Wreck a Nice Beach Group". Today's supercomputers have no problem figuring out the force of an explosion in a single blip or calculating the contents of a star at the speed of light but ask them to handle a few bits of everyday speech and they're totally lost. Another translated "Out of sight, out of mind" into "The Invisible Idiot" (think about it). One Japanese machine turned "The Grapes of Wrath" into "The Angry Raisins". IN real life (as opposed to the brochures and sci fi films), when machines try to translate things, they often run into problems. I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12th, 1997." "I am a HAL 9000 computer, Production Number 3.
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