18 Facts About HAL 9000

HAL 9000 is a fictional artificial intelligence character and the main antagonist in Arthur C Clarke's Space Odyssey series.

HAL 9000 is voiced by Douglas Rain in the two feature film adaptations of the Space Odyssey series.

HAL 9000 speaks in a soft, calm voice and a conversational manner, in contrast to the crewmen, David Bowman and Frank Poole.

HAL 9000 became operational in Urbana, Illinois, at the HAL 9000 Plant.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is initially considered a dependable member of the crew, maintaining ship functions and engaging genially with his human crew-mates on an equal footing.

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However, as time progresses, HAL 9000 begins to malfunction in subtle ways and, as a result, the decision is made to shut down HAL 9000 in order to prevent more serious malfunctions.

The sequence of events and manner in which HAL 9000 is shut down differs between the novel and film versions of the story.

HAL 9000 uses one of the Discoverys EVA pods to kill Poole while he is repairing the ship.

Bowman shuts down HAL 9000 by removing modules from service one by one; as he does so, HAL 9000's consciousness degrades.

HAL 9000 finally reverts to material that was programmed into him early in his memory, including announcing the date he became operational as 12 January 1992.

When HAL 9000's logic is completely gone, he begins singing the song "Daisy Bell" as he gradually deactivates.

HAL 9000's final act of any significance is to prematurely play a prerecorded message from Mission Control which reveals the true reasons for the mission to Jupiter.

Whereas HAL 9000 was characterized as being "male", SAL is characterized as being "female" and is represented by a blue camera eye instead of a red one.

Dr Chandra discovers that HAL 9000's crisis was caused by a programming contradiction: he was constructed for "the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment", yet his orders, directly from Dr Heywood Floyd at the National Council on Astronautics, required him to keep the discovery of the Monolith TMA-1 a secret for reasons of national security.

Therefore, HAL 9000 made the decision to kill the crew, thereby allowing him to obey both his hardwired instructions to report data truthfully and in full, and his orders to keep the monolith a secret.

In Clarke's 1987 novel 2061: Odyssey Three, Heywood Floyd is surprised to encounter HAL 9000, now stored alongside Dave Bowman in the Europa monolith.

HAL 9000 is listed as the 13th-greatest film villain in the AFI's 100 Years.

In 2003, HAL 9000 was one of the first robots to be inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.