HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality [Paperback]

David G. Stork (Editor), Arthur C. Clarke (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 6, 1998

I became operational... in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997.Inspired by HAL's self-proclaimed birth date, HAL's Legacy reflects upon science fiction's most famous computer and explores the relationship between science fantasy and technological fact. The informative, nontechnical chapters written especially for this book describe many of the areas of computer science critical to the design of intelligent machines, discuss whether scientists in the 1960s were accurate about the prospects for advancement in their fields, and look at how HAL has influenced scientific research.Contributions by leading scientists look at the technologies that would be critical if we were, as Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick imagined thirty years ago, to try and build HAL in 1997: supercomputers, fault-tolerance and reliability, planning, artificial intelligence, lipreading, speech recognition and synthesis, commonsense reasoning, the ability to recognize and display emotion, and human-machine interaction. A separate chapter by philosopher Daniel Dennett considers the ethical implications of intelligent machines.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If you loved "2001: A Space Odyssey," you'll be delighted by this book that asks "How realistic was HAL?" Contributions by various scientists include essays on supercomputer design with regard to speech synthesis, common sense reasoning, emotions, lip reading and even playing chess. As the authors explore what is science fantasy and what is technological fact, they also look at how HAL influenced technological development in the past 30 years. The final chapter, called "When HAL Kills, Who's to Blame?" deals with the ethical aspects of building intelligent machines. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

YA?Although it has been 30 years since Stanley Kubrick brought Arthur Clarke's 2001 to the screen, the many ethical as well as scientific questions that the film raised still create a stir. For this title, Stork asked some of our leading scientists to explain the developments in the area of artificial intelligence and to look again at HAL given today's technology. The result is this collection of original essays that span such topics as "Could we build HAL?" "How could HAL see?" and "When HAL kills, who's to blame?" and differentiate between those aspects of the famous computer's capabilities that are fact and those that will most likely always remain science fiction. Although the general focus of the book is the movie, it goes on to provide a balanced survey of the subject of artificial intelligence. Despite the scientific slant of these writings, they are amazingly readable. Appropriate supplemental reading for a variety of subject areas and equally enjoyable for science-fiction fans and film buffs.?Martha Ray, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; 1ST edition (February 6, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262692112
• ISBN-13: 978-0262692113
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,312,120 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dr. David G. Stork is Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations and has held faculty appointments in eight disciplines and programs: Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, Neuroscience, Psychology and Art and Art History variously at Wellesley College, Swarthmore College, Clark U., Boston U. and Stanford U. He holds at least 39 US patents and has published nearly 200 technical works including five books and two proceedings volumes. He graduated in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Maryland, College Park, and studied art history at Wellesley College. He was co-creator of the PBS television documentary, "2001: HAL's Legacy," comparing the computer science visions in the 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey" with actual developments in computer science, all in the namesake year. He's lectured at universities, conferences and museums on computer image analysis of art. He is also an accomplished orchestral musician and is heard on several professional compact disks.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gradually, HAL is coming...., March 25, 2002

By 

Dr. Lee D. Carlson (Baltimore, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality (Hardcover)

There are few films that have had the influence of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is difficult to say how many A.I. researchers were inspired to go into the field by the viewing of the film, but this book is good evidence that research in A.I. has undergone a sort of "public benchmarking" via a comparison with HAL, the arch computer-villan in the movie, and whose name is now ubiquitous in debates on robotics and artificial intelligence. This excellent book is a summary of just how far A.I. has come, as compared to the abilities of HAL. All of the authors acknowledge that the present level of A.I. is not what it is in HAL, but that progress is being made, in spite of, as one author remarked, the fact that A.I. is one of the most profoundly difficult problems in science.

Marvin Minsky is interviewed in the book, and he believes it is the problem of knowledge representation that has slowed down the progress in A.I. Too much time has been spent on chess programs and character recognition, and not on fundamentals, Minsky argues. Minsky also believes that emotions are absolutely essential in intelligent problem solving, and this is interesting in light of recent work on computational models of emotion.

The large physical size of HAL is compared with present sizes of computers in the article of David Kuck. But, the author argues, the human brain is also much smaller than HAL, but such a marvelous computing machine has yet to be emulated by even the best of present-day supercomputers. Size does not matter in matters of intelligence.

The article on error correction by R. Iyer is particularly insightful, for he argues, quite correctly, that making mistakes is a characteristic of true intelligence. HAL's brag that it is "incapable of error" is a sign of stupidity, rather than intelligence. False leads, uncompleted strategies and goals, and inconsistent reasoning are all part of genuine problem-solving.

M.S. Campbell discusses the efforts in machine chess, with Deep Blue of course being the focal point. Comparisons of how HAL plays chess compared to Deep Blue illustrate Campbell's belief that a mere combinatorial approach to playing chess should not be considered an intelligent one. HAL is intelligent because it plays intelligence like a human does, but Deep Blue does not. Campbell also gives an interesting historical summary of computer chess. He cites that example of a "fortress" position as one that chess computers have severe difficulty with.

The ability of computers to speak, and not sound "machine-like" is the subject of the article by J.P. Olive. His discussion gives the reader both an historical and technical overview of the difficulties involved in computer speech. And yes, the song "Daisy, Daisy" is real, and was the first song ever sung by a computer.

R. Kurzweil gives an optimistic overview of computer speech recognition. He details the "lessons" one needs to perform speech recognition and repeats his well-known desire to "reverse-engineer" the human brain, once the computational ability becomes available.

R.C. Schank discusses why he thinks A.I. must be able to understand more than just words, if natural language processing is to become a reality. And, interestingly, he believes that intelligence and problem solving are not necessarily the same thing and gives the reader insight into the difficulties involved in language acquisition by a computer.

This book was first printed in 1997, but given the recent news of a common sense reasoning computer developed by the company that D.B. Lenat heads, his article is particularly interesting. The ability of computers to exercise common sense is considered a fundamental requirement for machine intelligence, and Lenat outlines "3 easy steps" for the building of a HAL-like computer. It remains to be seen whether Lenat has indeed achieved this.

The ability of HAL to recognize images is discussed in the article by A. Rosenfeld. In light of the recent need for face recognition software for security enhancement, this discussion is particularly interesting. Rosenfeld details just what is difficult and what is easy to do in this area.

The capability of a computer to perform speechreading is the topic of D.Stork's article. Noting that speech has both auditory and visual aspects, Stork argues that HAL's ability to perform speechreading is far advanced in comparison to the real computers of today. He discusses interestingly, some of the tools used in current research on speechreading, such as hidden Markov models and neural networks.

The article of D. Norman addresses the human factors involved in living with intelligent machines. Norman contends that 2001 is too optimistic a projection of the future, and, in addition, that its technology is too large and bulky to be of much use to humans.

Computational models of emotion have been a subject of intense interest of late, and R. Picard addresses the issue of emotion and computers in his article. The discussion is fascinating, and Picard clearly believes that emotional states can be recoginized and mimicked by a computer. "Emotional" intelligence is something that must be part of any notion of artificial intelligence.

The ability of HAL to manipulate circumstances and trick the crew members is addressed in D.Wilkin's article. The ability to plan is based on common sense issues, and this is no where near being realized, he argues.

D.Stork interviews Stephen Wolfram in another article, and the reader learns of Wolfram's opinions on A.I. and related issues. Wolfram believes that its the nature of intelligence that must be understood to develop thinking machines, and not just processing power.

When thinking machines are built, legal issues of responsibility will naturally arise. D. Dennett addresses this in the last article of the book. Dennet puts HALs behavior in the context of what a human might do when faced with the mission priorities given to him. Turning off HAL was justified, but so was HALs response to it.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars HAL is based on real research..., July 7, 2001

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Cheng Linda "lindacheng" (Hong Kong) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality (Paperback)

I have only one word for this book: COOL! For science-fiction aficionados everywhere, HAL's Legacy is a review, in 1997 when HAL was supposed to be created, the state of the technology (artificial intelligence, natural language processing, speech processing, etc.) from premier Sci-Fi writer Arthur C. Clarke and leading computer scientists in the area of AI (and other areas) like Marvin Minsky. Are we there yet? Is HAL really possible? It includes deep analysis of specific scenes in the movie and tying it in with the different premises presented in the articles/chapters in the book.

This is one book absolute die-hard sci-fi fans should have, especially if you are working in the high tech sector.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oh! This is AI...a must have book, January 6, 2002

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HSIANG-YU YUAN - See all my reviews

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This review is from: HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality (Paperback)

This book is an ART and amazing. You can learn and know what
really Artificial Intelligence means and you feel happy, relaxed
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Every chapter will give you concise and clear information, and
also is interesting.
An excellent book for anyone who
is interested in mind, thought, robot, cognition, AI or
just like the Sci-Fi wrote by Clarke.
This is a book for professional AI programmer and
for anyone who just want to know what is Artificial Intelligence.