Why does hal 9000 go crazy

They climb into one of the EVA pods, out of earshot of Hal. Poole states that he has "a bad feeling about him". Bowman and Poole suggest disconnecting Hal if he is wrong about predicting the fault. Unbeknownst to them, Hal read their lips through the window of the spacepod. Translating their lip motions, Hal learns of their plans for his disconnection; according to Clarke, "he will be deprived of all his inputs, and thrown into an unimaginable state of unconsciousness.

To Hal, this is the equivalent of death. For he has never slept, and therefore he does not know that one can wake again. Poole goes out to replace the supposedly malfunctioning AE unit. As he drifts through space to the satellite dish, Hal takes control of the pod and rams it into Poole, disconnecting his oxygen hose and venting the air in his suit, killing him.

Bowman, obviously distraught by the loss of his friend, goes out to retrieve Poole's body. However, while Bowman is out on his excursion, Hal shuts off the life support systems on the three astronauts in hibernation, which kills them all. After Bowman returns to the Discovery I, Hal denies him reentry into the pod bay. So Bowman has to maneuver the pod over to the emergency airlock. Unfortunately, in his haste to retrieve his friend, Bowman had not bothered to don the helmet of his life-support suit because he had not believed he would need it, making it very difficult to enter the emergency airlock, as he would have to travel through the vacuum of space in order to do so.

This, however, does not stop Bowman. Risking the hazards of explosive decompression, he eventually gets inside, grabs a space helmet, and goes to Hal's logic memory center to erase his memory.

There he pulls out the memory tablets that control Hal's higher functions. As his memory degrades, Hal begins to give off information programmed very early in his life, such as the date he became operational. When all his logic is gone, he begins to sing the song " Daisy Bell. Heywood R. Hal does in fact skirt his security obligations and try to clue Dave into what's going on by telling him of his own concerns about the tight security and the "rumors" of something being dug up on the Moon the 1st monolith , for if Dave and by extension Frank figured it all out, Hal's dilemma would've been solved.

In fact, killing them wasn't really in the cards until Hal read their lips as they talked about the possibility of disconnecting him. As for the three men in Hibernation that Hal killed while Dave is off trying in vain to save Frank, well they were a part of the secret, so killing them meant Hal wouldn't have to lie to anybody why they were really in hibernation the in-universe excuse was that it was to save on supplies and oxygen and on the ship, though I could suppose that they were merely collateral damage as Hal was going off the rails.

Hal wasn't behaving out of malice or being "evil", he was merely trying to cope with the conflicting instructions as well as trying to stay alive, as he equated being disconnected with death, for he had never been to sleep either, and didn't know that one can wake up from being asleep. The entire situation was the result of the U.

If Dave and Frank had been read-in from the get go and Hal wouldn't have been given the instructions which violated his core programming, the entire mission would've gone off without a hitch, but then there would've been no movie and no novel. In both the novel and the film of the sequel, , the conflicting instructions and all memories of what Hal did in were removed by Dr. Chandra, Hal's creator, and he functioned perfectly, was perfectly trustworthy and didn't try to kill anybody though the crew had their doubts, understandably.

This is described more clearly in the novel, as stated on Wikipedia :. The novel explains that HAL is unable to resolve a conflict between his general mission to relay information accurately and orders specific to the mission requiring that he withhold from Bowman and Poole the true purpose of the mission. With the crew dead, he reasons, he would not need to be lying to them. He fabricates the failure of the AE unit so that their deaths would appear accidental. In other words, HAL is asked to lie , and he doesn't take to it very well, to say the least.

The conflict between his mission objectives backs him into a corner where he has to make some pretty big and cold leaps in logic in order to reconcile the paradox in his programmed orders. He became trapped. The technical term is an H. Moebius loop, which can happen in advanced computers with autonomous goal-seeking programs. This is taken directly from the screenplay but I believe it's the same in Clarke's book , which I read eons ago. Hal is malfunctioning, as explained by gnovice above. The monoliths are space probes meant to observe and accelerate the development of intelligent life on Earth.

The first monolith accelerates the mental development of a band of proto-men who become smart enough to use tools. The second monolith is buried on Earth's moon as a test of human development. Once humanity bas advanced sufficiently to travel to the moon and uncover it, the light activated monolith sends a radio signal to Jupiter triggering the Discovery One mission and a rather abrupt Kubrick scene change.

The third monolith contacts, abducts, studies, and transforms Dave Bowman. I was under the impression that Hal was affected by the monolith. The monolith seems to give the people and other intelligence in it's vicinity the ability to survive. When Hal saw that he was going to be terminated, this newly acquired ability kicked in, allowing Hal to come up with the plan and make it seem accidental for the sake of the mission.

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