Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 12, 1992 TAG: 9201120086
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
IT'S HAL'S BIRTHDAY, BUT WHERE'S HAL?
"Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Ill., on the 12th of January, 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it, I can sing it for you." -\ "2001: A Space Odyssey"
It's a genuinely touching scene in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," after the sentient HAL 9000 computer has run amok and killed four humans in deep space.
The Jupiter mission commander pulls the plug on HAL, and while he extracts computer memory cores, HAL's "mind" disintegrates and slowly winds down. Near the end, it recalls one of its earliest memories, singing "A Bicycle Built for Two."
It's Jan. 12, 1992.
So where's HAL?
"We've missed the deadline a little bit," conceded Larry Smarr, head of the National Supercomputing Applications Center, which by sheer, incredible coincidence is also in Urbana, Ill., home of the fictional HAL plant.
There is a real HAL plant in Urbana, HAL Communications, founded by three University of Illinois graduate students before HAL the computer was made famous by the 1968 motion picture. The name of the company was created by shifting the letters in IBM one position to the left in the alphabet.
But experts in computers and artificial intelligence, or AI, say no HAL 9000 will wake up and start preparing for a Jupiter mission in 1992.
"We certainly won't have a HAL by 2001, but I'm sure we'll have a HAL by 2201," said writer Arthur C. Clarke, who collaborated with director Kubrick on the screenplay before writing the novel.
HAL is still a creature of science fiction, according to Marvin Minsky, head of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and known as "the father of artificial intelligence."
"HAL has general common sense and understands human affairs, and knows the sort of thing that every person knows," he said. "And that's what we don't have in computers.
"We have machines that are champion-level playing chess and designing circuits and all sorts of things that people think are hard," Minsky said. "But there's no machine that can tie shoelaces or find its way home, or basically learn very much from experience."
Our technology can't yet give HAL "consciousness," but some people believe that computer speed and complexity are the only obstacles.
David Stork, a Stanford University professor and senior research scientist at the Ricoh California Research Center, will mark today with a "HAL's zero-th birthday" party.
"Wait'll you see the cake! It's an image of HAL. It will have a real, working red light in the middle, with a clear glass dome over the lens," Stork said, his voice gleeful.
"And as I cut it, we'll all sing, `Daisy, Daisy . . ."