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HAL 9000: IBM Shifted One Letter Earlier

Abstract

HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), has a name that is IBM with each letter shifted one step earlier in the alphabet: H=I-1, A=B-1, L=M-1. Fans spotted it after the film came out and read it as a dig at IBM. Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the screenplay, denied it repeatedly: the name stood for “Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer”, and since IBM had helped the production, he wrote, the coincidence would have led to a new name had anyone noticed it in time. Kubrick denied it too. See Myths and Misconceptions.

The Film and the Computer

2001: A Space Odyssey was released in April 1968, the year before the first Moon landing. HAL 9000 runs the Discovery One spacecraft: a calm, conversational machine with no body, only a red camera eye, a voice and control of every system on the ship. Kubrick first cast Martin Balsam as the voice, found him “too colloquially American”, and replaced him with the Canadian actor Douglas Rain, who recorded the lines in about a day and a half.

Unlike the robots of 1950s science fiction, HAL fails not through mechanical breakdown but through conflicting instructions, which made him a reference point for later discussions of AI.

IBM’s Part in the Film

IBM was consulted during production, and its logo appears on props in the film. When the company learned that the plot involved a computer that kills the crew, it agreed to the association on the condition that no “equipment failure” in the story could be linked to its products.

Clarke’s Explanation

In The Lost Worlds of 2001 (1972) Clarke rejected the reading: “IBM had given us a good deal of help”, and had he or Kubrick noticed the letter shift they would have changed the name. He gave the origin as Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer, with HAL as the initials. Kubrick denied the connection as well, in correspondence.

The one-letter offset is real; the evidence points to coincidence. The story has survived because IBM was, in 1968, the dominant computer company, and a homicidal computer one letter ahead of it was too good a joke to let go. HAL 9000 is covered in the context of AI imagination in The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and Computing in Popular Culture.

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