I watched a re-run of the 1968 film
2001:A Space Odyssey the other night and was thinking about the ship in that film, the
Discovery. (Hard to believe the film is 50 years old.)
On threads in the ‘other place’ there is much debate on fully automated ships. I got to thinking about the ship in this film, which although does carry a crew, is pretty much controlled and monitored by a central computer, the infamous HAL 9000.
There were problems ..
HAL basically went psycho, not something you would ever have expected from say a Decca autopilot.
Many people have noted that the name HAL is a one letter code shift backwards from IBM. A lot of people have told me this was deliberate. However I have a paperback about the making of 2001 which I bought decades ago (published in 1970) which starts with Arthur C. Clarke’s short story
‘The Sentinel’ on which certainly the first part of the film is based.
In the book Arthur C. Clarke firmly states that HAL was not a deliberate code shift from IBM. In fact he states the name HAL was derived from Heuristic Algorithm, think of it as a sort of computer program that learns and has hunches. Of course himself and Stanley Kubrick might have just been saying that in case IBM took umbrage at being associated with a completely round the bend nut job computer like HAL.