I thought the canon explanation was that HAL wasn't "insane", per se, but that he had been given conflicting orders (keep the Jupiter monolith secret, but also assist the crew in every way) and was resolving them as best he could.
There is no "canon" explanation for the film, since Kubrick did not provide one, and 2001 was, at heart, his movie, independent in significant respects from Clarke's novelization and later sequels.
That being said, I think the onscreen evidence for Clarke's version is compelling. Most notably, it solves the mystery highlighted by the article as to why HAL didn't kill Bowman on the first EVA: If the computer could have engineered a plausibly innocent loss of contact with Mission Control, he could have acted freely to preserve both the astronauts' ignorance and the success of the mission without worry of being contradicted by the ground-based twin computer (which he surely knew would eventually diverge from his decision-making, having not been informed about the Monolith).
Once the astronauts were told of the divergence and took it seriously enough for their discussion in the pod, HAL had no remaining options.
I recently re-read 2001 and there was a forward by Clarke that explained something I hadn't known before - the screenplay and the book were developed simultaneously, in a joint collaboration between Kubrick and Clarke. Kubrick wanted Clarke to come up with an epic space story and put it on the screen, but didn't want to burden Clarke with having to write a screenplay.
So I don't think you can really call the book a "novelization" because both worked on it.
>There is no "canon" explanation for the film, since Kubrick did not provide one, and 2001 was, at heart, his movie, independent in significant respects from Clarke's novelization and later sequels.
If you reject the canonicity of Clarke's novel, then everything after the "Jupiter and beyond..." card is nonsensical. What is the viewer supposed to think about the space baby that's actually grounded in something within the movie?
(Edit: Ditto for the aging sequence. I know that you can fit the events into the "alien zoo" framing, but since the film doesn't direct us to that explanation, and if the novel doesn't count, it can't be any more than a fan theory.)
Incidentally, that's why I think the film went sharply downhill after that card.
> What is the viewer supposed to think about the space baby that's actually grounded in something within the movie?
Let's see. At the beginning of the movie we witness the dawn of Man. That is, we see tribes of apes shaken by beastly emotions, fear, rage, aggression; eaten by predators, sleeping under rocks, fighting with each other for food and water. Not a pretty sight. The tribe that wins and will give birth to mankind is the most violent one, the one that discovered how to use tools to kill.
But jump forward a few million years of evolution, and a seemingly refined humanity is travelling in space and having civilised (if somewhat cautious) conversations about science and current events.
On the spaceship (curiously spermatozoa-shaped) that is sent to investigate the mystery of the monolith, there's a crew of hyper-rational astronauts together with science's latest, most refined tool, an evolution of man itself: a super-human intelligence that embodies an ideal of rationality and civility.
And how does this end up? In a violent bloodbath, with men fighting to death, tooth and nails, with their own super-human creation. Clearly, anything men can produce is tainted by the original sin of violence.
So David Bowman is transported to a place that seems to be outside space or time, a room decorated in a style that's the essence of civility but also of sterile coldness; in this space he sees himself living by a futile ideal of sophistication, only to proceed towards his inevitable decay and death. And as he's approaching his last moments, the monolith (the otherness) intervenes again, extracting from his consumed shell, at last, a really new kind of humanity.
Nice. This may be the best short synopsis/theory I've ever run across. (I've seen the movie probably close to 15 times, starting during its initial run when I was 12. And read the book several times.)
Yeah but you can't let that dynamic turn into license for incomprehensible scripts!
"Oh, the movie doesn't have to make sense because maybe they encountered something no one can understand. Mind blown, right? Yeah, here's where to ship the Emmy..."
Clarke addressed this question directly in his sequel "2010", in which Dr Chandra describes Hal's descent into madness as a "Hofstadter-Moebius loop", in which a lie from a trusted authority figure (the US government) contradicted HAL's instructions from another trusted authority, the crew, which introduced an insoluble logical impasse, resulting in a breakdown in HAL's executive function -- a homicidal level of frustration.
And given that this is a now obsolete explanation for schizophrenia it makes perfect sense that they'd use it in a movie back then. I can also attest to being caught in one and that it can be enormously stressful - they are also more difficult if you are prone to all-or-nothing or black and white thinking, so again the traditional notion of computer logic would be more prone to it.
yeah the novel goes and "solve" the misery. with the task of saving the mission, not lying to the humans and withheld information about the alien, the only logical step to resolve the constraint when the human ask about the mission nature is to kill them to prevent having to lie or having to divulge information.
this also echoes many Asimov novel in principle and especially one in specific where the ai goes trough all rules and the only non conflicting way to solve the constraint was self destruct (cant remember the title)
Even macos autolayout subsystem (cassowary solver) can break constraints based on priority as part of regular operation. It is a linear/logical problem, strange that scifi robots fail in it. Probably scifi authors are not aware of non-strict problems.
No-lie should have minimal priority possible, otherwise HAL breaking TLoR is only a matter of time.
This has to be the most intellectually sound, and technically sophisticated analysis that still has, "Well then of course there wouldn't be a movie to watch," as it's answer.
Haha. Anyone who has written more than a dozen lines of CSS is hopefully also familiar with the computer ignoring one directive in favor of the other. Try this:
.foo { display: inline; float: right; }
Better believe foo won't be inline! That’s per spec :)
Maybe a programmer accidentally added another zero to the priority value for keeping the secret (say, 100 instead of 10). Hard constraints are the limiting case of soft constraints.
Or, to be sure, he put -1 into priority field and published in hurry into production. He didn't know that the value was cast to unsigned long in the view controller. Still happens in the future, I guess.
This second video is of particular interest to me, as it tackles a problem I've been thinking quite a lot lately : is self-modification compatible with volition? What's the point of wanting something if you can chose what to want? The pill that makes you love the idea of killing your kids is an extreme example, and probably no-one would accept to take this pill, but it's really not so obvious why. Or at least, the reasons are pretty deep.
BTW IMHO a simpler example would be a meta-suicide pill : instead of being a poison that would just kill you, it's a pill that would make you want to kill yourself. I suppose you can make people want to kill themselves by inflicting them an awful chronic pain such that death would look like the only solution, but the pill I'm thinking about would not do that : it would change your mind so that you would want to die just because you like the idea of dying, for no particular reason.
If this is an interesting topic, give "Permutation City" by "Greg Egan" a read. It involves a digitized character that intentionally modifies itself in order to avoid unhappiness.
talks about how current AI fears misrepresent the problem and gives multiple examples of difficulty of defining correct objective function. I enjoyed this explanation a lot!
Sanity is a legal definition, not a psychological one. People often forget that even the mentally-damaged act with reason and logic. This rationality may not be accessible to a bystander, but is present regardless.
I see the article as making a distinction without a difference. Kubrick was perfectly clear in his presentation of HAL's motives. There were a few points of interest, like the chess game, which I missed when I watched the film, but the 'theory' is how I viewed HAL's actions the whole time.
It's just as we are eager to label others as insane simply because their goals violently conflict with ours and they would do hurtful things to us.
We're eager to label the behavior of various criminals or politicians as crazy or stupid because we disapprove of it - however, often (though not always) if you take a step back, it's quite consistent with their interest, the evil behavior is reasonable, rational and understandable in context of their situation and goals.
It's not the execution we should worry about, but rather about alignment of goals - as for other people, as for AI.
I had always felt the film made perfectly clear HAL was acting totally rationally within several conflicting sets of mission parameters and moral codes.
Not even conflicting orders. I thought it was explicitly stated (towards the end of the book, maybe? It's been years since I read it) that HAL had been ordered by mission command to ensure the success of the mission at the expense of the crew if necessary. As crew members started acting suboptimally, HAL realised they were already jeopardizing the mission just by being fallible humans, and started to fix the problem. An example of the law of unintended consequences, maybe, but not a malfunction.
In the book, sure. In the movie this isn't at all clear. Or rather: it's evident HAL considers himself essential to the mission; it's also evident when they threaten to disconnect him, he can be considered to act in defense of the mission itself. This is entirely rational.
However, the movie implies HAL has a real problem. I don't know if actually "insane", but he incorrectly predicts the malfunction of the antenna, and when confronted about it, he cannot say much more than "oops!". I don't buy this article's explanation of why he could have faked his analysis of the antenna -- going by the movie itself, it's clear to me HAL makes a mistake (maybe because he is conflicted about the contradictory orders). HAL makes a mistake for which there is no easy way to backpedal without looking faulty.
Also, in the movie (and this is explored more in "2010: The Year We Made Contact"), it's clear HAL-class computers are capable of irrational, human-like thought. HAL feels threatened by disconnection. He sounds very scared when Dave Bowman finally disables him ("Stop, Dave. I'm afraid"). A similar computer on Earth, SAL, is similary worried about temporary disconnection and asks "will I dream?". And in the final scene of 2010, Doctor Chandra must be both gentle to HAL and appeal to his sense of duty for him to follow orders.
I think there's a very good case that HAL did, indeed, go insane. Even if it was because of contradictory orders.
I wouldn't look too deeply into the movie's separations from the text.
One is a very neat science fiction story that allows you to hold your own interpretations and the other is a vision quest that tells you where you're going.
Kubrick has always been liberally symbolic in his works, many times sacrificing "story elements" to show the picture he wants you to see.
Oh. I'm fully aware of the differences between the novel and the movie (and also the fact that they were complementary and simultaneous works). I'm just arguing that in the movie HAL may actually be insane.
As an aside, I liked the movie better. It is a timeless work of art and (to me) the measure of every non-space-opera space movie, whereas the book was ok but not memorable.
> HAL has to be extremely careful before committing the first murder. It is possible that he wasn't entirely familiar with the EVA procedure, it being one of the few tasks on board the Discovery that does not require his participation. Perhaps he needed to observe a dry run to study the astronaut's actions and calculate when he would be most vulnerable.
I had always assumed that Kubrick gave an explicit clue that HAL had "snapped" when he strangely repeats himself when he claims to have detected a problem. HAL suddenly says "just a moment... just a moment..."
It comes across as just the sort of error he was supposedly incapable of.
I agree with the hint at a timing cue but still don't think HAL 'went insane', I more agree that he found an 'insane' "solution" to a problem humans would find intractable.
The "just a moment..." can be thought of more as an auditory interface representation of "processing", where HAL is exploring the solution space of ever more unlikely solutions until it has at last resolved a statistically superior solution.
I am amazed at the level of detail that Kubrick went into. Even after decades of movie's release there are hidden nuggets I keep finding. Absolutely brilliant.
The section on the chess game is not particularly persuasive. According to Stockfish, black already has winning position. So Frank (playing white) can no longer make mistakes. All moves at his disposal lead to the same outcome.
"Queen to Bishop three" is not a legal move, so Frank could have autocorrected it.
At "Replacing the AE-35 Unit" there seems to be a typo in this sentence: "Such people tend to be curious and want to get the bottom of mysteries, is HAL is trying to pique their curiosity so that they will take the required action to fulfil his murder plan."
