“Ego problem” was probably not the best term for me to use. HAL began malfunctioning because he had been giving conflicting programming. He knew why they were going to Jupiter but he couldn’t tell the crew. When he gets wind that Bowman and Poole want to disconnect him, his loyalty (for lack of a better word) to the mission causes his meltdown. At least, that’s what I’m remembering from the book. And I believe it is explained in more detail in “2010” the sequel.
I would expect that a computer could lip read- IF it had prior exposure to the speaker.
If a computer can understand human speech, making it able to also lipread wouldn’t be a significant advancement.
Agreed.
Really? Wouldn’t it be just as confused by ‘elephant shoes’ as a person is?
I guess I’m missing the OP’s question.
In Star Trek TOS, Spock played three dimensional chess against the ship’s computer in several episodes. It was even a plot point in “The Court Martial” that Spock should have been only able to achieve a draw, and since he won several times in a row, it implied that something was wrong with the computer.
I thought HAL’s level of ability in regards to communication & interaction with the humans more impressive than playing chess. As a matter of fact, during that same chess game, doesn’t HAL admit that he was working on the routine psycological evaluations of the crew?
Context. How often will a crew member be likely to say “elephant shoes” during the normal course of a mission.
(I believe HAL taught himself to read lips, probably by comparing visual input with prior conversations.)
I don’t know if it affects the argument at all, but IIRC Spock’s reasoning that he should only be able to play the computer to a draw was specifically because he had programmed it.
Which doesn’t really hold up: I wrote a Connect Four program, and can still beat it routinely.
:smack:
I forgot that dialog.
But no, it doesn’t really change anything for me. I mean, I didn’t personally see anything remarkable about a chess playing computer when I first saw the movie (sometime in the 70’s). As I said, the ability of the computer to hold a conversation in casual/colloquial terms was more impressive to me. (As opposed to Star Trek’s computer merely replying to a verbal search/compute query in an obviously artificial sounding voice.)
All that proves is: you’re not Spock…
Either that or Finney is hiding somewhere in his house.
Claude Shannon also worked on chess in the early 1950s. I believe his methods are more like those used today. But IMO opinion Shannon was smarter than Turing, and that is saying a lot.
When I took AI at MIT in 1971, Pat Winston probably pointed this out 5 times.
When I was at Illinois in 1974 there were people working on chess programs, while they were working on new heuristics, chess programs were hardly revolutionary.
BTW, in the very early 1960s a checkers program beat the world champion.
Quick: stop your heartbeat!!
Oh, I agree with you. But I think that for dramatic reasons, HAL’s problem didn’t manifest itself until later in the movie, after the chess scene. I didn’t see any sign of HAL’s problem there.
Nowadays it sounds plausible, but in 1968, not so much. Not for me anyway.
Just had a quick look at the site, and I agree with you about it. I bookmarked it for a longer read later. I’ve never noticed Poole (not Bowman:smack:–it’s been quite a while since I last saw 2001) move his lips during the game, but then I’ve never looked for it. If it’s actually true that HAL was cheating, it really changes the dynamics of the scene.
Now a computer playing Go expertly is the new challenge. There are various reasons for this, but they mostly come down to the fact that since you can place a piece anywhere the branching factor for a given state is huge (and good luck writing a heuristic to cull out the ones no sane player would do, some of the most brilliant moves in Go history look like complete random nonsense moves).
2001 is one of my favorite movies and I spent most of a recent Saturday on the collative learning site that** Hail Ants** linked to. At this site, Mr. Clay Waldrop analyzes HAL’s thought processes through the lens of the chess scene. Here’s an excerpt:
*Playing white, Frank’s “Queen takes Pawn,” HAL counters with, “Bishop takes Knight’s Pawn,” and Frank plays “Rook to King One.” HAL then makes a ‘mistake’ in announcing a forced mate (i.e. checkmate) when he begins by saying “Queen to Bishop three” instead of the correct “Queen to Bishop six.”
In descriptive notation, ranks are always given from the point of view of the side making the move. Kubrick, having played chess extensively in his youth, is well aware of this. Being a chess enthusiast and a film perfectionist, I wouldn’t think he would allow such a gaffe to crop up in a film of his. Moreover, I have recently been informed by Gerrit Bodde that this game was taken from a master game, Roesch vs. Schlage, (1) played in 1913, and reported by the German news magazine “Der Spiegel.” This makes it exceedingly unlikely that this is a gaffe.
No chess-playing machine could possibly make a mistake in reporting a chess position. So HAL says “three” deliberately. Why does he do this? Perhaps to test Frank’s suitability for carrying out the mission. Does he conclude that Frank is not suitable? He doesn’t seem to be a very worthy opponent, he did not even pick up on the computers simple 'mistake, ’ which costs him the game. With his inexorable machine logic HAL might view Frank as flawed and therefore a risk to the mission. Indeed, HAL makes it perfectly clear that he considers all human beings to be error-prone, while he is, “foolproof and incapable of error,” and later he will attribute a discrepancy between himself and a twin HAL 9000 computer back on Earth to “human error.”
Of course, HAL might not have attempted a deliberate mistake, as it posed a grave risk of being caught, but perhaps he chose to do this because the moves in the game were not being recorded, except possibly by himself. *
Here’s the main site, which links to many other Kubrick articles, when you’re finished with the collative learning material.
I didn’t pick up much (if any) of Kubrick/Clarke’s big themes on my own, but I managed to notice a fine detail the first time I watched the scene right after the chess game, in which HAL sets his murder plot in motion. Just before HAL announces the impending failure of the AE-35 unit - a clear lie that he knows will eventually be discovered by Mission Control, he crunches a huge amount of data - so much that the verbal equivalent of the hourglass icon we see on our computers today occurs. HAL’s “Just a moment, just a moment” seems like a small processing hang up, but it’s chilling to realize that in that moment he’s judged and sentenced the Discovery’s crew to death for being a threat to the hidden mission. Kubrick spends many minutes building up HAL’s “humanity” in earlier scenes, such as the BBC 12 interview and his wishing Poole a happy birthday, only to unmask his true nature in the AE-35 scene. When I re-watch the “just a moment” scene, I sometimes see HAL as a sentient murderer and other times as just a machine. Did HAL murder the crew, or were they all just victims of a mechanical accident, much like the crew of an aircraft with a malfunctioning autopilot? I love this movie.
I can see that I’m going to have to watch it again. It’s been so long…
Waldrop’s analysis is similar to an explanation for HAL’s behaviour that I remember reading long ago. The idea was that despite programming HAL with pure logic, humans had unwittingly created inherent human weakness in him, including pride. Knowing that he’s intellectually superior to the astronauts, HAL’s ego makes him think that only he is capable of making the mission succeed, so he stages a bloody palace coup.
Granted, I am not an Astronaut with Doctorates in whatever, but “meh”.
My ears might have heard “bishop three”, but my eyes would have seen the actual move.
Depending on how engrossing the game is, I might not have even noticed the discrepency.
That might be an argument for Frank’s unsuitability… except that he reacts to the situation as it is, not as it is reported to him by his instruments [HAL]. 
Why did he let them retrieve the unit? He let them retrieve the unit, test it, and report status back to Houston (or wherever). (I forget which guy) was going to place the suspect unit back in (during a second EVA), and that’s when HAL struck. I always got the impression that HAL was as surprised as the astronauts about the error.