I do understand what you were saying about ‘athiests.’ I have the ability to be deep about things but sometimes my impetuousness gets in the way.

I also pay tribute to Arthur C. Clarke. I have watched 2001: A Space Odyssey many times. I’m a huge fan of HAL.

Thanks for your comment on my blog.

Your point about the size of HAL is well-taken. But since a super-powerful sentient machine like HAL has never actually been built, it isn’t clear how big such a machine would need to be. For scale, the “HAL room” in 2001 was comparable in size (within a factor of 2 or 3) to modern day supercomputers like IBMs Blue Gene (which, although powerful, haven’t reached the sophistication of fictional HAL…yet).

HAL was also much smaller than powerful “computing farms” used for major scientific analysis. For instance, some of the analyses I did for the STAR experiment at RHIC (an experiment on Long Island at Brookhaven), used the NERSC computing facility (photo below) in Oakland. This was basically a fairly large room full of linked PCs in a large parallel format. It was much, much bigger than HAL, but still hadn’t reached sentience — although some might say it did have psychological problems :)

Arthur Clarke, though, I did enjoy reading. 2001 was and still is a Sci-Fi classic, and HAL has to be one of the all time scary non-person characters in a film. That something so human could be construed from a red light is just brilliant and a credit to Clarke and Kubrick. Though I would have to argue that Clarke misjudged the size of the computer needed for HAL by several orders of magnitude. Realize that the original Apollo mission module had as much computing power as a present day pocket calculator.