01  02 

Alan Turing

"Is it true, Dr. Chandra, that you chose the name Hal to be one step ahead of IBM?"

"Utter nonsense! Half of us come from IBM and we've been trying to stamp out that story for years. I thought that by now every intelligent person knew that H-A-L is derived from Heuristic ALgorithmic."

Afterwards, Max swore that he could distinctly hear the capital letters.

-- 2010: Odyssey Two

Sometimes you just can't win. I deliberately inserted that passage into Odyssey Two because for decades I too had been "trying to stamp out that story." I don't know when or how it originated, but believe me it's pure coincidence, even though the odds against it are 263 to 1. (Much less, of course, if you eliminate ridiculous -- or vulgar -- combinations.)

I was embarrassed by the whole affair, and I felt that IBM, which was very helpful to Stanley Kubrick during the making of 2001, would be annoyed. (Bell Telephone and PanAm -- remember them? -- also provided useful services. How difficult it is to foresee the future! At least Hilton and Howard Johnson are still with us, though they are not yet in space.)

Well, recently I gave a satellite address to an IBM conference in Europe and was pleasantly surprised to discover that all had been forgiven. In fact, because Big Blue now seems quite proud of the link and no longer fears guilt by association, I've happily abandoned my attempt to set the record straight.

Of course, I'm pleased that the distinguished contributors of this book are also trying, so to speak, to put the record straight -- even though the hindsight of specialists is bound to be more accurate than the foresight of a writer and filmmaker -- especially in a field as rapidly changing as computer science. A great deal has happened since Stanley and I worked so hard to learn all we could about that nascent field (and about space travel too, for that matter).

Although I've never considered 2001 as a strict prediction -- but as more of a vision, a way thinks could work -- I have long kept track, informally, of how our vision compares with computer science reality. Some things we got right -- even righter than we ever had a reason to suspect. Others, well, who could have known?

In analyzing these issues, the contributors to HAL's Legacy have done us all a great service. They've given us so much more than a scorecard for the film and novel. These creators of the real technology and science have shown the reasons for the way things developed -- and may continue to develop -- to 2001 and beyond. Their clear analysis of the details of 2001 -- a single chess move, say, or the click of an (analog!) camera, the use of the single word take -- illuminates both science and science fantasy. They also present informed and exciting speculations about the future of computing and artificial intelligence. I have learned a lot from this book and have been especially happy to know how its contributors were affected by 2001.

Still, there are many things about HAL no one else could explain. For instance, why was he "born" at Urbana, Illinois? Though I have long forgotten most of the reasons for decisions we made a third of a century ago, I remember this one clearly.

My applied mathematics tutor at King's College, Cambridge, when I took my degree in 1947-1948 was the distinguished cosmologist George McVittie. He taught me the elements of perturbation theory, which I have used in several of my stories -- as I acknowledged in Reach for Tomorrow. During the 1950s George moved to the United States, where he took up a post at the University of Illinois, Urbana.

I was happy to pay this fitting tribute to him, for I am now sure he must have been involved in establishing the Supercomputer Center at Urbana. A few months ago I came across a photograph of the now-famous Bletchley Park team that was responsible for breaking the ENIGMA cypher during World War II. There in the middle was, needless to say, Alan Turing; and standing shyly at the back was George. I had had no idea that he was involved, for of course he never mentioned his association with one of the war's greatest secrets. (How ironic that Alan Turing, who perhaps contributed more than any other individual to the Allied victory, would never have been allowed into Bletchley under normal security regulations.) Bletchley Park's COLOSSUS, which I suppose had something like the capability of a 1995 laptop computer, is widely regarded as one of the ancestors of today's programmable computers. Without it, the war might well have been lost -- or at least greatly prolonged.