HAL, the mellow-voiced computer that went nuts in "2001: A Space Odyssey," secured a place in popular culture with a mutiny and a dying rendition of "Bicycle Built for Two."
But how does HAL stack up against reality? Or more to the point, how does modern scientific reality stack up against HAL?As HAL's fictional birth date approaches, a new book explores the areas in which today's computer scientists have surpassed the vision of HAL's creators and where they have fallen short.
The book's conclusion: Despite unimaginable advances in some areas, notably chess, a computer with common sense is still science fiction.
"Machines are really smart these days about specialized things," said Marvin Minsky, an MIT professor of computer science. "But machines are no good at the things people find easy. So it's a wonderful paradox."
Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, is one of 17 luminaries who contributed to "HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality." The book was the idea of David Stork, a scientist who credits HAL with inspiring him to try to develop lip-reading computers.
It's scheduled for publication on Jan. 12, 1997, the date Arthur C. Clarke's novel says HAL became operational. Stork and other contributors were speaking Friday before a screening in Cambridge of the 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie. (For the record: In the movie, HAL's birthday was five years earlier, Jan. 12, 1992.)
In the film, HAL takes control of a space mission after reading the lips of crewmen who planned to turn him off and shuts down the life-support system for scientists aboard the ship.
The dialogue between HAL and an astronaut in a landing pod has become a movie classic.
"Open the pod bay doors, HAL," the commander says.
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that," HAL replies.
Stork, the book's editor, said scientists who normally scoff at sci-fi movies return to see "2001" again and again because of its attention to scientific detail.
"In `2001,' the more you look the better it is, whereas something like `Star Wars,' the more you look at it the more ridiculous it seems," said Stork, chief scientist at the Ricoh California Research Center at Stanford.
Clarke and Kubrick spent 2,400 hours on the script. They avoided common sci-fi pitfalls, like noisy explosions in soundless outer space, and also gave scientists food for thought.
Roger Schank was a graduate school student specializing in computer use of natural language when he saw the movie on a blind date. The date went nowhere, but Schank said his head was spinning with ideas when he left the theater.
"I began to think about all the processes and all the problems that had to be solved," said Schank, now director of the Institute of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. "Everything that was in there was a challenge in some sense."
In the book, Minsky talks about whether scientists looking into artificial intelligence got off track by concentrating on creating "dumb experts," like chess-playing computers, instead of focusing on more basic problems. Schank contributed a chapter on HAL's use of language.
There also are sections on computer vision, talking computers and speech recognition. There is even one on the morals of HAL's actions: computer ethics.
HAL has been surpassed in computer graphics and hopefully in reliability. And a combination of supercomputers probably could create a hardware package as powerful as HAL's, Stork said.
But computer speech, vision and lip-reading remain rudimentary. And artificial intelligence is not nearly developed enough to reproduce common sense and human emotion.
Schank once thought there would be a HAL by 2001. Now he sees "HAL's Legacy" as an obituary for the dream of a humanlike machine.
"You probably never could make HAL exactly and you probably wouldn't want to," he said. "It isn't important to get computers to fall in love and have a good meal. There are all sorts of other things that are more important."
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