Greg asks:

> How did HAL "screw up", in the sense meant by the author?

Writing all of this from memory, HAL predicted a failure in the AE-35 unit
mounted on the deep space telemetry antenna in four days. When the unit was
taken out of the antenna -- on HAL's recommendation -- and brought into the
main bay for analysis (using 1968 HP oscillosope probes, btw), one of the two
crewmen says, "I'll be damned if I can find anything wrong," and HAL
responds, "It is puzzling."

The far deeper problem that this failure by HAL to properly predict the
failure implied was that no HAL 9000 computer had ever been known to make a
mistake -- and everyone, the crewmen, Houston control, and HAL himself
realized the extremely serious implications of this mistake. While problems
with other, earth-bound HAL 9000's had been reported in the past, "This kind
of thing has cropped up in the past, but they've always been attributable to
human error," HAL said.

The problem the crew now faced, given that HAL had clearly messed up, was
that he ran every attribute of the ship's operation -- and their problem was
to engineer some method of disconnecting his higher brain functions while
leaving the autonomic functions in place, without alarming HAL as to what
they were planning on doing.

It didn't work. HAL became alarmed.

Wirt Atmar

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