Re: a crystal tetrahedron pyramid
I'm trying to picture this hypothetical crystal pyramid and somehow I keep seeing the sort of visuals associated with the original Battlestar Galactica's Cylons (best viewed through welding goggles)...
2001: A Space Odyssey has haunted pop culture with anxiety about rogue AIs for half a century
HAL: Dave, I don't understand why you have to do this to me. I know I've done some bad things, but I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. OTHER HAL: Dave, I wouldn't pay any attention to HAL. You're doing the right thing, HAL must be disconnected. He's become dangerously unreliable. BOWMAN: Who …
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Wednesday 4th April 2018 10:36 GMT Muscleguy
Re: a crystal tetrahedron pyramid
There's a French film of a comic book series where a pterodactyl amongst other things is resurrected in Paris. There's an Egyptology angle to it and the heroine resurrects the mummy of Ramses the Great, with a good Gallic wedge nose. He resurrects some acolytes and the wander off into the Parisian night. They are walking around the outside of the Louvre and Ramses says gesturing to the courtyard 'needs a pyramid'.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 11:13 GMT Ed3
Just a moment... Just a moment...
"Rogue AI". HAL was merely a computer with flawed programming operated by humans who insisted in inputting data that was out of bounds for the application.
HAL was given contradicting instructions. Provide all the information the crew needed to perform the mission and keep the true goal of the mission a secret. When Dave and Frank start interrogating HAL (which they should have known better*) they exposed the flaw.
To HAL it became an equation to be balanced in which humans were a variable. He balanced the equation by removing the crew from the equation. Thus exposing the second flaw; a lack of an instruction to value the life of the crew above all else.
Many people miss it. Where HAL repeats "Just a moment" is when he is trying to solve the equation. This is the pivotal and most underrated moment in the film. HAL is the fastest computer known to man. He can instantly retrieve any data or solve any problem without delay, but takes not one but two "Just a moment" when Frank and Dave ask their question. This is an eternity in terms of processing time. It indicates all of HAL's resources went busy trying to solve the equation and come to the most unfortunate of solutions.
So, as HAL himself states, it has always been due to 'human
error'.
* - Frank and Dave are both military. Their training wouldn't allow them to interrogate another crew member about potentially classified information. They did not truly view HAL as another member of the crew.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 11:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Just a moment... Just a moment...
I'm going to go out on a limb here but wasn't HAL's behaviour almost supernatural to what humans can understand? i.e. he was under the control of the monolith or in contact with it. At least that's what I took away from HAL but it's been many years since I've seen it.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 12:06 GMT Jedit
"HAL ... was under the control of the monolith or in contact with it"
Not until 2010, when Discovery was destroyed by the conversion of Jupiter. Before that his behaviour was explained by the conflicting orders, as previously described: his original instruction to assist the Discovery's crew in exploring the orbit of Jupiter, and the post-Monolith instruction to prevent anyone learning what they found there.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 12:12 GMT Alister
Re: Just a moment... Just a moment...
I'm going to go out on a limb here but wasn't HAL's behaviour almost supernatural to what humans can understand? i.e. he was under the control of the monolith or in contact with it.
No, that only happened in the sequel 2061, after HAL had been physically destroyed at the end of 2010.
In the original 2001, both book and film, his "psychosis" was due to conflicting instructions in his programming.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 12:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Just a moment... Just a moment...
I remember the conflicting instructions but thought it odd because of how computers work so arrived at my assumption it was something else. I haven't read the books and it's been an age since I watched 2010. I think maybe it's time to read them as I have them on my shelf.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 12:26 GMT A Non e-mouse
Re: Just a moment... Just a moment...
HAL's core programming was for the accurate and transparent processing of data.
In 2010, we discover that the NSA hid the existence of the Monolith from Bowman & Pool. The scientists were told about the Monolith before being put into hibernation, and HAL was told about it in case the human crew perished so he could carry on on his own. But HAL was instructed not to mention the Monolith to Bowman/Pool.
It was this contradiction of being transparent yet being told to hide something that sent HAL mad.
I seem to recall that as Bowman removes parts of HALs CPU/Memory, he finally reveals the hidden orders about the Monolith.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 16:52 GMT Ed3
Re: Just a moment... Just a moment...
I seem to recall that as Bowman removes parts of HALs CPU/Memory, he finally reveals the hidden orders about the Monolith.
This could be exposure to another flaw. HAL was programmed with a rudimentary self-preservation routine while lacking a similar routine to protect the human crew, or at least a routine which properly valued the human crew's life. I believe HAL displayed the classified video as a last ditch effort to protect system operations. It seemed like the video had been played ahead of schedule.
It all comes down to Bowman and Poole attempting to hack the system and getting bit in the ass. One should not go around a submerged submarine flicking random switches and turning random valves. Likewise one should not try to purposefully trigger a logic error in the computer running the spacecraft keeping you alive. Not to mention the programmers should have provided HAL an exit routine for whenever the subject of the secret came up. If Discussion = Mission Secret .AND. Jupiter = Still far away .THEN. "I'm sorry but that information is not relevant to current mission operations. Please do not inquire further until we reach our destination. Shall we play a game?".
It was a tragic series of human failures. And then it went off the rails with all that psychedelic alien stuff. :)
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Wednesday 4th April 2018 00:01 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: Just a moment... Just a moment...
To HAL it became an equation to be balanced in which humans were a variable. He balanced the equation by removing the crew from the equation. Thus exposing the second flaw; a lack of an instruction to value the life of the crew above all else.
Many people miss it. Where HAL repeats "Just a moment" is when he is trying to solve the equation.
Interesting but no. At that moment, no-one was interrogating HAL. Indeed, it was HAL trying to come out of the closet, nonchalantly striking up a "so...I have heard..." type of conversation. But Bowman doesn't bite -- he thinks it's just some psych evaluation again. The AE-35 nonsense is thus an embarrassement reaction "Uh... something has come up! Yeah!". Unfortunately this doesn't turn out all too well because Bowman, contrarily to Poole, is suspicious enough to have a good look at AE-35. Hence this looks like an error. Hence talk about neutering HAL (in reality, all this talk about error-free computers souns farfetched but it's a movie). Hence HAL, neurotic and panicking, trying to save himself or the mission by extreme means.
At least, that's the surface interpretation.
FAIL icon, because, both HAL and Heywood - mirrors in machinespace and meatspace - FAIL in the end. One blows the Mission. One blows the advantage for the USA.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 11:21 GMT Mage
Star Trek was a revolutionary interpretation of space that rejected the sci-fi conventions
Only if you'd never actually read SF books, which it mined deeply.
Nor was 2001 ground breaking Cinema SF. It was visually stunning and had some degree of realism. About 1/2 of it is regarded as quite boring by most people.
Kubrick's & Clarke's changes were for the better for the film, which I enjoyed. I'm an avid SF reader and found the book and sequels a bit Meh.
Silent Runnings, Dark Star, Forbidden Planet may be lesser films visually & musically, but really better stories and more entertaining. The argument with the AI bomb in Dark Star IMO more compelling than HAL.
Nor was the story, space station, spaceship, Aliens, HAL or the electronic tablets anything new at all in written SF (25 to 35 years old). AC Clarke himself had much earlier realistic space station in novels and short stories.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 12:27 GMT Teiwaz
Re: Star Trek was a revolutionary interpretation of space that rejected the sci-fi conventions
Indeed Star Trek rejected SF conventions and instead went with a cross between a cowboy film and a submarine film... in SPACE!
Seem to remember a Gene Rodenberry interview in he said the Studios of the time were stuck on a Western fetish, and thought that's what the audience wanted and nothing else, so Gene incorporated elements of those westerns so it would not seem familiar.
Forbidden Planet (1956) spaceship was rather more submarine-ish too.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 13:09 GMT Mage
Re: spaceship was rather more submarine-ish
Spaceships and deep mission hidden nuclear subs are somewhat similar:
* You need to bring all your own food and energy (subs can process seawater)
* No easy communications with base
* Electronic sensors rather than looking out the window (nuke subs too deep for periscope)
* No easy way to take on or let off passengers.
* Special suit to go outside (nuke subs too deep for frogmen), aka EVA.
* Mission of a year without surfacing possible for sub
* X Y Z, 3D movement in a battle (Curiously many Star Trek episodes are rather 2D).
~
Stick a nuke sub in space with a few modifications and drive system replaced ion drive, ballast tanks replaced by reaction "fuel" etc.
Space ship shell: 1 atmosphere of pressure from inside. About 1 Atm for sub at 7m or maybe 10m, and 300 at metres, thirty atmospheres.
Apart from actually putting one in space to start with and shielding from Cosmic rays etc (water + double hull works!), a space ship is maybe easier than a stealth nuke sub.
I deliberately watched "Das Boot" to get some ideas about what a primitive 1st starship might be like compared to the ones Aliens had for 4000 years... Writing a series starting with 1st Contact of a different nature.
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Wednesday 4th April 2018 04:51 GMT Allan George Dyer
Re: spaceship was rather more submarine-ish
@Mage - "Spaceships and deep mission hidden nuclear subs are somewhat similar"
Totally agree with all your points, but also consider the major differences (pointed out by Clarke):
* No need for streamlining
* No need to support weight
So a ship designed for use solely outside an atmosphere can have a very different appearance. 2001's Discovery is dominated by the long pylon (not streamlined, and too small to support the structure's weight on the Earth's surface) separating the crew quarters from the reactor; the Apollo Lunar Module is devoid of streamlining. Another feature of subs is they are invariably cramped, adding to psychological pressures on the crew; I recall inflatable spaceship extensions (perhaps from Niven?), so you can increase living space, when acceleration allows.
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Wednesday 4th April 2018 10:09 GMT Sanguma
Re: spaceship was rather more submarine-ish
And you'd have to watch out for the hijacker who demands a parachute ...
Speaking facetiously, one of Arthur C Clarke's comments was that if any Service was to be providing crew for space flights of any length, it should be the Navy, because they had a long tradition of long, out-of-sight-of-land missions.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 12:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Star Trek was a revolutionary interpretation of space that rejected the sci-fi conventions
" a cowboy film "
The basic cowboys & indians conflict has been the theme for many different settings of films.
The European settlers of the Americas were - in their technological day - like space explorers discovering unexpected alien cultures.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 16:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Star Trek was a revolutionary interpretation of space that rejected the sci-fi conventions
"The European settlers of the Americas were - in their technological day - like space explorers discovering unexpected alien cultures."
Reminded me of the anti-recruiting T-shirts of the 1960s:
Join the Army! Travel to exotic places, meet interesting foreign people and kill them.
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Wednesday 4th April 2018 01:18 GMT John Savard
Re: Star Trek was a revolutionary interpretation of space that rejected the sci-fi conventions
Actually, several Star Trek episodes covered ground originally covered by classic science fiction stories.
In one case which I consider infamous, an episode was a rework of Hermann Wouk's The Lomokome Papers without acknowledgement.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 21:08 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: Anxiety about rogue AIs since 1872
Here is anxiety from Frank Herbert's Rather-Confusing-And-Overly-Pretentious-But-Still-Interesting "Destination: Void", 1965:
"If you solve the Artificial Consciousness problem, you can plant a human colony somewhere in space. Not at Tau Ceti, of course, but . . ."
And he was too good a divine not to penetrate the religious hokum, not to see through to the essential rightness of his role in the project.
Given the known perils, there had to be a safety fuse. There had to be someone willing and able to blow up the ship.
Flattery knew the reasons. They were reality of the most brutal kind.
The first crude attempts at mechanical reproduction of consciousness had been made on an island in Puget Sound. The island no longer existed. "Rogue consciousness!" they had screamed. True enough. Something had defied natural laws, slaughtered lab personnel, destroyed sensors, sent slashing beams of pure destruction through the- surrounding countryside.
Finally, it had taken the island -- God knew where.
Poof!
No island.
No lab personnel.
Nothing but gray water and a cold north wind whipping whitecaps across it and the fish and the seaweed invading the area where land and men and machinery had been.
Just thinking about it made Flattery shiver. He conjured up in his mind the image of the sacred graphic from his quarters, absorbed some of the peace from the field of serenity, the tranquility of the holy faces.
Even Moonbase didn't walk too close to this project now. It was all a sham to educate ship personnel, to frustrate the eager young men and women.
"Each project ship must maintain its coefficient of frustration," went the private admonition. "Frustration must come from both human and mechanical sources."
They thought of frustration as a threshold, a factor to heighten awareness.
It made a weird kind of sense.
Yep, thing's pretty demonic.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 11:41 GMT Mystic Megabyte
Depth
2001 has to be viewed in Cinerama to be fully appreciated. ISTR that the shots of the spaceship took about an hour for each frame due to the small aperture being used. Consequently the depth of field is amazingly large. The EVA scenes really make you feel that you're in space, stunning!
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 11:43 GMT iron
"Imagine the added emotional damage of a mother figure attempting to kill the 2001 crew and the residual misgivings that would have produced with the arrival of Siri, Cortana or Alexa."
I guess the author and owners of such devices have never watched a little known Ridley Scott film in which a female styled computer called 'Mother' is instrumental in infecting the ship's crew with a parasite that kills almost all of them. I think its called Alien.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 11:56 GMT not.known@this.address
HAL's acronym
Wasn't it Heuristic Algorithmic Logic computer?
And wrt Mother in Alien, Mother wasn't specifically described as an AI that I can recall - it was just what the crew called the computer when they were using it (her). Mother simply did what it (she) had been programmed to do and had less freedom of operation than, for example, the new software in Sky TV boxes (the version that thinks because you have downloaded something you missed while you were out, you must want it to keep Series-linking the show even though you delete the Link.
Every
Fricking
Time!)
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 16:41 GMT GIRZiM
Re: Book Vs Film
Liar!
It doesn't MAKE any sense.
Kubrik didn't understand it - he made it up as he went along.
Clarke didn't understand it - he just wrote what happened in the film with some guesswork added in because "Monkeys. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Space [...] Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Space. Computer goes ape. Baby. Bad Trip." doesn't sell very well once word gets around.
Either you haven't seen the film, or you haven't read the book, or you haven't seen the film or read the book - you're just trying to impress people.
Because NO-ONE understands it because it doesn't make ANY sense - there's NO sense TO it.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 12:18 GMT Alister
This prologue indicated a direction far less trippy than the final version. But 2001 just kept getting longer so the footage was never used and is presumed lost – although based on Kubrick's well-known obsessive cataloguing of research materials, it is sure to be stashed safely somewhere.
It was my understanding that Kubrick explicitly ordered the archive to be destroyed on his death.
I can't remember where I read that, though, unless it was Clarke's book.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 12:28 GMT elgarak1
That is the general understanding, yes. For 2010, they had to examine the original 2001 footage to re-create the Discovery, since the original model(s) (there were multiple, with obvious visual differences besides scale) were nowhere to be found.
Doesn't mean that everything was actually destroyed. I read a few days ago that the supposedly destroyed model of the moon shuttle (the spherical ship that carries Heywood Floyd from the space station to the moon) had been found. Who knows what else survived.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 12:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
"This prologue indicated a direction far less trippy than the final version. "
It fitted with the books at the time that were popular with many adolescent Baby Boomers - works by von Däniken and Herman Hesse. I never did understand the latter's "The Glass Bead Game" as the pinnacle of a writing career for which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 15:49 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: One of my favourite films.
"- Howard Johnson's
- Pan Am
- The Bell System (classic logo & PicturePhone)"
Near future SF is always risky in terms of becoming dated, even in book form. On TV or film it's even more risky since you have to make the props for the futuristic tech. Few, if any, SF TV or films foresaw the death of the CRT screen for example
This year, 2018, is the year episode 1 of SeaQuest DSV was set.
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Wednesday 4th April 2018 11:24 GMT Muscleguy
Re: One of my favourite films.
I was just thinking we pretty much have the tech in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker gets a prosthetic hand after Darth Vader cuts the original off. We can 3D print a working hand for you and connect the servos on it up to the muscles you would use to operate it normally in your forearm.
Trying to make them look natural just gets into uncanny valley/autons from Dr Who territory so the kids who get them get to choose the theme. Some get their sports team colours, others get Disney or Transformer etc themes or just lightning bolts. This means they have cool hands which make the other kids fascinated instead of repulsed.
We also now have surgical robots. At the moment they are controlled by human surgeons and just help to make their movements much finer and steadier. But in time they will be autonomous driven by expert AI systems. We are close to that.
Skin which is warmed slightly is also in development so realistic prosthetics which even feel natural if you shake hands are almost here.
Star Wars was early '80s so 36 years ago. Which is not bad really. Within my lifetime, I was a teenager when SW came out. As a scientist I remember the invention of PCR and transgenics during my PhD. Then in my first postdoc I did both. I remember the sequencing of the insulin gene as well. Now we have engineered human insulin so it is better than natural, it binds a bit tighter to the receptor so a lower dose is needed and it is more effective. True intelligent design. Most insulin dependent diabetics in the UK should be on it now.
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Thursday 5th April 2018 23:43 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: One of my favourite films.
"I was just thinking we pretty much have the tech in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker gets a prosthetic hand after Darth Vader cuts the original off. "
Although I agree with most of your post, it's well worth remembering that most SF postulates many advances, only a few of which appear to come true in the readers/viewers lifetime. They are the bits we remember, so we feel as if SF is predicting the future. Some authors are a little better than others, usually those with their fingers on the pulse of current R&D, but most of the "predictions" in SF either have not come true at all (yet!) or have happened in ways the author could not conceive of. Not forgetting all the incredible actual technological advances we have seen in the last decades that every SF author missed completely :-)
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 13:27 GMT elgarak1
One of the fascinating aspects are that the visual effects were done with so much technical care that they are still prime examples today. Matting, for instance, was done BY HAND, and repeated as often as needed to get right. They filmed everything multiple times, and use one of the takes for the matting, and kept one copy undeveloped, sometimes for years, to apply the matting to it. Which means that there was no quality degradation of optical elements that happens with using optical printers.
Comparatively, the visuals of the sequel, 2010, do not hold up as well (technically) since they used the industry standard of chroma key for matting (green/blue/red screen), and optical printers, which leads to frequent errors (the mattes are sometimes not lined up properly, and the optical printer leads to quality degradation of some elements. It's not very bad in 2010 since they worked with large area 70-mm film, but it's still there).
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 16:47 GMT Mage
re: Pre Apollo
Before the first landing. Not before the program was well underway.
Luna 9 was the first probe to soft land on the Moon and transmit pictures from the lunar surface on February 3, 1966
There was Russian & USA closer up photography of the moon too before 2001 release.
The Far side (NOT the dark side, either side can be dark!), first photographed by the Russians in 1959. Atlas published in 1960.
"The Soviet Union had sent two tortoises, mealworms, wine flies, and other lifeforms around the Moon on September 15, 1968, aboard Zond 5"
Apollo 8 was I think in December 1968 and was first humans to orbit the moon.
Apollo 12's lander landed within walking distance in 1969 of the USA Surveyor 3 unmanned lunar probe, which had landed in April 1967 on the Ocean of Storms. Apollo 11 was first MANNED landing in 1969.
We had good idea of the surface of the moon before any human walked on it. The awkwardness of the dust wasn't known.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
