Today, our guest, scientist Andrew Boyd discusses a
legendary movie figure. The University of Houston
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
In the 1968 film 2001,
director Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C.
Clarke introduce us to the most infamous
engineering icon in cinematic history: HAL, the
computer onboard the Jupiter space mission.
{The voice of Hal says, "Good afternoon, Gentlemen. I
am a HAL 9000
computer." }
Undoubtedly the most complex character in the film,
HAL interacted much like a human — even to the
point of letting inner conflicts drive him to
murder. While artificial intelligence has long been
captivating material for computer scientists,
philosophers, science fiction writers, and movie
directors alike, HAL stands out as both a
fascinating film character and a carefully thought
out vision of where artificial intelligence
might've been at the dawn of the new millennium.
In the book Hal's Legacy, editor David Stork
compiles a collection of essays by some of the
leading minds in the field of artificial
intelligence. The picture that emerges is how
overly optimistic early prognostications were from
the artificial intelligence community. Clearly,
nothing remotely resembling HAL can be found today.
But even some of HAL's most basic capabilities
remain tremendous engineering puzzles.
Take, for example, speech recognition. The sound
waves produced by different people pronouncing the
word "table" are strikingly varied. You and I have
little difficulty sorting through the many
pronunciations to arrive at the proper word, yet
the task remains quite problematical for computers.
Establishing the meaning of words is vastly more
complicated. Take the sentence "Time flies like an
arrow." You and I recognize this as a statement
about the speed with which time seems to pass:
"time flies," and it does so "like an arrow."
Computers have been known to wonder if it is a
request to use a stop watch to measure the speed of
flies, and to take the measurement in the same way
that an arrow would: "time flies" and do so "like
an arrow."
{The voice of Hal says, "I'm sorry, Dave; I'm afraid I can't do
that." }
The lack of commercial speech recognition
applications and the continued proliferation of
keyboards are a testament to just how hard speech
recognition remains.
While artificial intelligence has made some
progress, the speed has been disappointing at best.
David Kuck, former director of the Center for
Supercomputing Research and Development at the
University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (HAL's
fictional birthplace) admits that "under any
general definition ... artificial intelligence has
so far been a failure."
{The voice of Hal says, "This sort of thing has cropped up
before, and it has always been due to human
error" }
Researchers remain convinced that much
of human intelligence can be replicated, though
wild-eyed optimism has been replaced by realism. John
McCarthy, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University,
has commented that if we work really hard, we'll have
an intelligent system in somewhere from four to four
hundred years.
So we may have to wait a long time before we meet
HAL. For all our engineering prowess, we have yet
to unlock the mystery of human intelligence. Will
we ever? Only time will tell.
{The voice of Hal says, This conversation can serve no
purpose anymore.
Goodbye. }
I'm Andy Boyd, at the University of Houston, where
we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
D. Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream
and Reality. MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1997.
Dr. Andrew Boyd is Chief Scientist and Senior Vice
President at PROS, a provider of pricing and
revenue optimization solutions. Dr. Boyd received
his A.B. with Honors at Oberlin College with majors
in Mathematics and Economics in 1981, and his Ph.D.
in Operations Research from MIT in 1987. Prior to
joining PROS, he enjoyed a successful ten-year
career as a university professor.
HAL's view of Frank and Dave as he -- it -- reads
their lips
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2003 by John H.
Lienhard.
