Everyone's favorite homicidal computer - Arthur C. Clarke's H.A.L. 9000 from his book 2001: A Space Odyssey
- turns 9 years old today. A 2003 inductee into the Robot Hall Of
Fame (along with R2-D2 from Star Wars), H.A.L. murdered the crew of the spaceship Discovery in Clarke's
book and Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film (where a possible flubbed line had
the maniacal machine born five years earlier). H.A.L. stands for "Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic
computer", with "Heuristic" and "Algorithmic" being two primary processes of intelligence, as
the RHF website notes.Everyone's second favorite homicidal computer - a network (much like Al Gore's Internet) called SkyNet from James Cameron's The Terminator - turns 9 on August 29.
1. "H.A.L. stands for "Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer"
Actually, if you subtract one letter from HAL you get IBM. The design of the HAL logo is exactly like the logo on the IBM mainframes of the time (360).
Clarke just made up some bogus reason for why he's called HAL, but it was also an in joke
Posted at 4:57PM on Jan 12th 2006 by James Hudnall