HAL's Legacy
 
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HAL's Legacy:
2001's Computer as Dream and Reality

Edited by David G. Stork
Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke
Published by The MIT Press

Hal Room

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. Not only would these technologies be critical in building HAL, but all are being explored for the design of today's intelligent machines. A separate chapter by philosopher Daniel Dennett considers the ethical implications of intelligent machines.

Profusely illustrated with color images from the film and from current research, HAL's Legacy provides surprising new perspectives on key moments in the film - you will never view 2001 the same way again.


CONTENTS:

The Best-Informed Dream: HAL and the Vision of 2001
David G. Stork

Scientist on the Set: An Interview with Marvin Minsky
David G. Stork

Could We Build HAL? Supercomputer Design
David J. Kuck

"Foolproof and incapable of error?" Reliable Computing and Fault Tolerance
Ravishankar K. Iyer

"An Enjoyable Game": How HAL Plays Chess
Murray S. Campbell

"The Talking Computer": Text to Speech Synthesis
Joseph P. Olive

When Will HAL Understand What We Are Saying? Computer Speech Recognition and Understanding
Ray Kurzweil

"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that": How Could HAL Use Language
Roger C. Schank

From 2001 to 2001: Common Sense and the Mind of HAL
Douglas B. Lenat

Eyes for Computers: How HAL Could "See"
Azriel Rosenfeld

"I could see your lips move": HAL and Speechreading
David G. Stork

Living in Space: Working with the Machines of the Future
Donald A. Norman

Does HAL Cry Digital Tears?: Computers and Emotions
Rosalind W. Picard

"That's something I could not allow to happen": HAL and Planning
David E. Wilkins

Computers, Science, and Extraterrestrials: An Interview with Stephen Wolfram
David G. Stork

When HAL Kills, Who's to Blame? Computer Ethics
Daniel C. Dennett

To order a copy of HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality:

Call 1-800-553-7752
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