I am a HAL Nine Thousand computer, Production Number 3. I became operational at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997. -- HAL, 2001: A Space Odyssey (the novel)

At a dinner party some time ago, an acquaintance, a nonscientist, asked me in a casual way about my duties as chief scientist at a research lab. I said that one of my great joys was overseeing a wide range of projects, to varying extents, and I mentioned a few of them: pattern recognition, machine learning, neural networks, computer-chip design, supercomputer design, image compression, expert systems, handwriting recognition, document analysis, uses of global networks such as the World Wide Web, novel human-machine interfaces, and so on. Then I turned to one of the areas of my particular expertise: lipreading by computer.

"Oh," she said, "Like HAL." Ah, a kindred soul, I thought. We spent quite some time discussing the state of the art and the challenges of computer lipreading, its possible applications, and so on. Later our discussion turned to other topics suggested by the movie -- language understanding, chess, computer vision, artificial intelligence. It was clear that she was interested in the current state of the art and that many years before the film had both caught her imagination and helped her identify crucial issues in today's computer science. One of the questions she asked was, "How realistic was HAL?"

This book is for people like her. And because no one is an expert in all the topics covered in the film, even scientists are sure to learn from the accounts of other areas. The book is much more than an answer to her question, though. It has four major goals, which it addresses in varying proportions in the sixteen chapters.


Analysis

It is a testament to Clarke and Kubrick's achievement that 2001 still holds up to close scrutiny in the late 1990s. Under the expert eyes of the contributors, the most innocuous aspects of scenes -- a line of computer code on a screen, a chess move, the use of a word, the form of a button -- reveal a great deal. Even though I've seen the film several dozen times, I have learned an immense amount from the contributors. HAL's Legacy seeks to do for 2001 what good art history does for a major painting; namely, make the viewer see it in a new light -- a tall order, to be sure!


Teaching

The film illustrates key ideas in several disciplines of computer science, and thus provides a springboard for discussions of the field in greater depth, including our own research. Descriptions of the world computer chess champion Deep Blue system, the commercially successful VOICE recognition system, the massive CYC artificial-intelligence project, the award-winning Mathematica software system, and much more are here discussed by their creators at a level accessible to the general reader.


Prognostication

It is natural, too, to look to the future. Several contributors make informed and fascinating predictions based on developments in the field. What are the most promising approaches toward artificial intelligence? Will we ever be able to "reverse engineer" a human brain and represent it in a computer?


Reflection

2001 transcends the label of "science fiction movie" and captures many of the central metaphors of our time, telling us much about society and its aspirations. The film has even been praised by the pope! Many people have been deeply affected by the film, among them several contributors who reflect here about its influence on their own careers and on computer science in general.

Clearly, HAL's Legacy differs from books on the making of the film or its cinematography. It differs, too, from books that analyze the science shown in movies or on television -- science that is incidental and just "goes along for the ride." To an extent unprecedented and never duplicated in a feature film, the makers of 2001 were as careful as possible to get things right; when they did make errors, they often did so in illuminating ways.

Now seems like the perfect time for HAL's Legacy. Birthdays are an important theme in the film (there are at least five of them), and in the novel, HAL "becomes operational ... on January 12, 1997." Kubrick changed the year to 1992 for the film version -- perhaps to give HAL a longer lifetime and so make his death more poignant. On the 1992 date, I -- along with colleagues, faculty, and assorted Silicon Valley friends -- held a birthday party for HAL. I was interviewed by several papers, and an Associated Press photo of me cutting the HAL cake (shaped like his console, complete with red LED under a clear plastic hemisphere) appeared worldwide. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that much of the general public was interested in HAL too.