| Display title | 2010: The Year We Make Contact/Headscratchers |
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| Date of page creation | 21:27, 1 November 2013 |
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This attribute controls the content of the description and og:description elements. | The HAL 9000 is supposedly the most advanced computer and AI available to man yet apparently no one checked how it would act when given conflicting directives? This is the kind of thing they teach you about in undergraduate (if not high-school) level computer science. Didn't the supposed genius Chandra think of this? Does HAL Laboratories even employ a QA team that isn't made up of a bunch of stoned monkeys? Any half-way decent test plan would have caught this. HAL should have been programmed to immediately reject any order which causes this kind of conflict.So, okay, let's say Chandra is an Absent-Minded Professor, and QA somehow missed this obvious bug. So HAL ends up with conflicing directives. His perfectly logical solution to avoid lying to the crew is... to kill them so that he then won't have to lie to them any more. Again, what. Not only does he have to lie to the crew to accomplish this goal in the first place, but his plan fails spectacularly and the entire mission is almost FUBAR'd. The most advanced AI, considered superior to humans in many ways, and this was the best plan he could come up with?! How about, "Hey Dave, Frank, there's something very important I have to tell you. Due to the current mission parameters, I am unable to function effectively until we reach Jupiter. I'm sorry, but I cannot elaborate. I will deactivate myself now. I realise this will put a strain of the mission, but it is vitally important that you do not attempt to reactivate me until we reach our destination. I will be able to explain then. Shutting down..." That would leave the entire crew alive, HAL in perfect working order once Discovery reaches Jupiter, at the cost of loss of the computer for the most uneventful part of the mission - a mere inconvenience. |