Reflecting on science fiction's most famous computer, this book explores the relationship between science fantasy and technological fact. Nontechnical chapters 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 advacement in their fields and look at how HAL has influenced scientific research. Contributions look at the technologies that would be critical to attempt to build a HAL in 1997.The author, David G. Stork (stork@psych.stanford.edu) , 19 March, 1997
RESOURCES ASSOCIATED WITH HAL'S LEGACY
You can read several chapters of "HAL's Legacy"online at:

http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/Hal/

and see some of the celebrations associated with the birth of the HAL 9000 computer at:

http://matia.stanford.edu/~stork/HALTalks.html.

The book is profusely illustrated with images from "2001" and current research, and is written for nonscientific and scientific audiences alike, and will appeal especially to fans of science fantasy and technological reality familiar with the film. It consists of chapters specially written by world leaders in various aspects of computer science, as listed on the Table of Contents. The book has four main goals:

1) Compare the vision of computer science as
expressed in "2001: A Space Odyssey" with
actual developments in the 30 years since the
film's release.

2) Teach basic aspects of computer science, such as
speech recognition, computer vision, language
understanding, lipreading, and artificial
intelligence, and the difficulties in solving
them.

3) Shed greater light on the movie itself, giving the
viewer a deeper aesthetic appreciation of the
film.

4) Show how the film influenced the careers of
budding computer scientists.

The book sheds light on key moments of the film: you will never see "2001" (or your own computer) the same way again. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.