Book details of 'HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality'

Title	HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
Author(s)	David G. Stork
ISBN	0262193787
Language	English
Published	November 1996
Publisher	MIT Press

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality':

Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
If you loved "2001: A Space Odyssey," you'll be delighted by this book that asks "How realistic was HAL?" Contributions by various scientists include essays on supercomputer design with regard to speech synthesis, common sense reasoning, emotions, lip reading and even playing chess. As the authors explore what is science fantasy and what is technological fact, they also look at how HAL influenced technological development in the past 30 years. The final chapter, called "When HAL Kills, Who's to Blame?" deals with the ethical aspects of building intelligent machines.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
HAL as a legacy system? Since I do occasionally review the technical aspects of fictional works, I see nothing wrong with a book that "reviews" the capabilities of a fictional computer. HAL is probably the most famous computer, real or fictional, of all time; arguably the central character of "2001"; and certainly, the most appealing character. And, besides, according to Clarke's more realistic book timeline, it's HAL's birthday. The essays collected in this work cover topics such as supercomputer design, fault tolerance and reliable computing (which, ironically, appears to assign the "original bug/moth" story to the wrong machine), computer chess playing, speech synthesis, speech recognition, speech understanding, computer use of natural language, knowledge bases, computer vision, visual speech reading, user interfacing, computer emotion, computer planning, and computer ethics. The papers look at the possibility of the capabilities ascribed to HAL, the current state of the art, predictions of future directions, and personal reminiscences of the film and reactions to it. Each essay includes an annotated bibliography for further studies. The contributors are major players in their respective fields. (The piece on computer chess, for example, is by one of the leaders of the Deep Blue team.) A few other items are harder to define, being general editorials. (Donald Norman's article on working with machines is particularly snide in tone, and limited in content.) While the book is technically accurate and sophisticated, the writing is accessible to the intelligent lay reader, without requiring an engineering or computer background. For those wanting an introduction to various of the fields of artificial intelligence, as well as science fiction fans, an enlightening and valuable read. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1997
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Book description:

"I became operational . . . in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997." 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.