Stork: HAL is born in Urbana, Illinois. Why?
Clarke: I chose Urbana for a personal reason. My professor of Applied Maths at King's college was George MacVeaty, who later went to Urbana and the University of Illinios. I discovered later that George worked at Bletchley Park, where they broke the Enigma code, the German code. And when in fact the first general purpose computer was built, Colossus, for the specific purpose of code breaking. Also at Bletchley park, of course Alan Turing was working, and Alan developed that test Kana Machine, they wrote a book called "Kana Machine Think", and they devised that famous test so that if you were having a conversation, say through a teleprinter or a computer, and you can't tell if the entity at the other end is a human being or a machine- then whatever is at the other end has intelligence. Now this test has been conducted several times in rather limited areas, and people can be fooled for quite a while, but eventually you can ask the entity at the other end something it wouldn't understand and it gives a stupid answer.

Stork: Now, HAL is born on Jan. 12, 1992. Why that date, and why that early before 2001?
Clarke: I'm afraid that Hal has two different birthdates, one in the film, and one in the novel. And they're already both far in the past. I don't know why we chose either date. I'm not even sure that we knew that they were both Sundays.

Stork: You toyed with the idea of making HAL a mobile robot. Why did you reject that?
Clarke: At one time we thought HAL would be a conventional robot. It could move around and do things. Then we realized, I think, that that was a clichŽ. There would be far too many clanking monsters, you know, Robbie the Robot and other menacing ones. And, of course, the most beautiful robot of all, Metropolis, Fritz Lang's Metropolis. So we got away from that clichŽ, and we also realized that if it had distributed censors and could see everything that was going on all over the place, and perhaps manipulators so that it could control things, it didn't have to move the central brain. It could be in one place, immobile. This again is an old idea going back to Olof Stapens, "Last and First Men" where one of the races of mankind in the future was giant immobile brains with life support systems and all sorts of sensors, but they never moved. They didn't have to."

Stork: It was primarily for artistic reasons would you say? To make HAL not a mobile robot?
Clarke: I think we made Hal non mobile partly for artistic reasons and also it was a lot easier to do it that way. Although a confrontation between the astronauts and a mobile HAL flashing his arms around could be quite a dramatic sort of scene- in fact I think something like that has been done from time to time but I'm glad we didn't do it. Incidentally, I am becoming rather like HAL because I'm no longer mobile, but I have sensors all over the world now.

Stork: HAL kills. Is it murder?
Clarke: When HAL kills, I don't think that it's murder. Well, it depends entirely on your definition. It might be self defense which is an argument used in law. I think that it was self-defense rather than murder.

Stork: Would it be immoral to disconnect an intelligent computer such as HAL?
Clarke: It's an interesting question whether it would be immoral to disconnect or even switch off temporarily an intelligent computer. On the other hand, some computers might like to be able to sleep from time to time just like we intelligent computers wish to do. So, it's a debatable point. One of the reasons why we made HAL the way we did, because then the disconnection could be shown dramatically. Pulling out all those things. But of course, it wouldn't be so dramatic if it were a microchip that big.

Stork: HAL asks, not in the movie but in the book, whether he will dream when he's turned off. Will a computer dream when it's turned off?
Clarke: I see no reason why computers shouldn't dream. For the same reason that some people think that we dream. We dream to sort of sort out the trash in all the inputs and the information that's gone pouring in during the day and sort of put in the various directories. Trash that, save that, and so forth. This is maybe what our dreams do. I'm sure that an intelligent computer would have to do the same kind of thing. But it could probably do it by multi-tasking and it wouldn't have to be switched off.

Stork: Throughout the film there are many commercial interests. Tell us about those and why you thought there would be Bell Telephone and so forth in outer space in 2001.
Clarke: Like most big movie projects we just try to get inputs from industry, for two reasons, sometimes companies will actually pay, in any case it's good publicity in both directions even though no money exchanges. Bell Labs of course was approached. It's ironic that Bell Labs was dissolved soon after the movie came out.

Stork: Tell us about chess as a hallmark of intelligence and its relation to HAL.
Clarke: Kubrick chose chess for several reasons I'm sure. One is he made a modest living as a hustler in Washington Square playing chess against the characters that were there who play for a few dollars. Fortunately, I never learned even the basic rules of chess. Deliberately, because I was afraid that if I did, I would be doomed. And it's very lucky; this is a decision that I made as a small boy. I was very fond of checkers and darts, but chess, no way. And if I had been a chess player, 2001 would have never been made. I'm sure Stanley and I would've wasted so much time, and gotten so frustrated by being beaten by him. Whether chess is a test of intelligence, of course is a moot point since the chess champion is now a computer.

Stork: Why do you call it moot? It might mean that this machine is intelligent. Do you think that Deep Blue is intelligent?
Clarke: If chess is a test of intelligence, then obviously some computers are more intelligent than human beings. But if Chess is a matter of you know, brute force; algorithms and just trying everything until you find one that works, it's not really intelligence.

Stork: So you would say that there are no intelligent machines now?
Clarke: I doubt if there are any really intelligent machines now but I 'm pretty sure there are some on the drawing board. Maybe in ten years they'll be around. The first robots that can make other robots are already in existence.

Stork: So would you say that that's artificial life?
Clarke: Artificial life is another question, not the same as artificial intelligence. Of course there are cellular automata, which are patterns that move across the computer screen according to very simple rules, and they do behave as though they're living things. They could be defined as living creatures though their possibilities are rather limited I'd say.