Fifty percent accuracy over a 30 year range is not bad.
Avi Blizovsky
The year 2001 arrived, and the CNN website, as well as the Science website, decided to dedicate a series of articles to a comparison between the science predicted in the book and the movie "A Space Odyssey 2001" and reality. One section concerned the computer mentioned in the film, HAL which Clark always avoided the fact that all the letters are one letter apart in AB. from the letters that make up the name IBM.
When we first meet the god computer, it seems like there's nothing he can't do. He actually operates the space probe Discovery on the way to Jupiter, maintains the life support system, plays chess with the crew members, has an opinion on the diagrams drawn by astronauts and can answer bbc interviewers in 2001. We don't have a computer with the capabilities of God.
But Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick, who co-wrote the script, also happened to discover the Internet. Here is an excerpt from the Hebrew translation of the book: "He had plenty of things to occupy himself with during the time at his disposal, he would not even do anything but sit and read, when he was tired of the official reports, recollections and protocol lists, he would plug his news device into the plug and receive a stream of updated information From a news center on the ground. One by one he would upload the most important electronic newspapers of the world; He knew the codes of the most important ones by heart, and did not need to consult the list printed on the back of his notebook, he pressed the back of the short-term memory button of the chapter-head unit, brought up the first page and held it, quickly scanned the titles and noted to himself the the items he was interested in. Each of them was accompanied by its own section, which referred to the subject. When he selected it, the rectangle was the size of a postage stamp and expanded until it completely filled the screen, and Floyd could read it comfortably. When he was finished, he would repeat the entire page on the screen and select a new topic for a scratch test.
Floyd sometimes wondered if the news machine and the amazing technology behind it was the last word in man's quest for perfect communication. Here he is here. far away in space moving away from the Earth at a speed of thousands of kilometers per hour. And yet he can. in a second. to see the titles of any newspaper he wants. (The very word..newspaper". Of course, it was an anachronism from the electronic age, the text was automatically updated hourly. Even if you only read the English-language versions, you could spend a lifetime absorbing the constantly changing stream of information from the news satellites, and nothing else. Hard. To imagine how the method could be improved or made more convenient, but sooner or later, thought Floyd, this method would be replaced by something unimaginable, just as Gutenberg or Caxton could not imagine something like the news machine."
There was also another thought, which was always brought up by reviewing the titles. The content is bland, unimportant and more depressing. Accidents, crimes, natural disasters and calamities are still the main subject of the millions of words that have been splashed into space. Nevertheless, Floyd wondered if indeed this thing was essentially bad; Utopia magazines, he decided a long time ago, would be boring to death.
However, Clark does not sail in his imagination beyond the use of the Internet and computing in general as a news tool. In fact, when Dr. Floyd arrives on the moon, Clark writes: "After a short walk through a tunnel full of pipes and cables, the shock of rhythmic beats reverberating through hollows, they reached an active area, and Floyd found himself again in the familiar environment of typewriters, office computers, maids, whiteboards Messages and phones are ringing." Has anyone seen my typewriter?
In any case, reality in 2001 surpasses any science fiction. The strangeness of the quantum world, where one system can be in two different states at the same time, exists, it was believed until recently, only in the microscopic world. But as part of the summary of the ten great discoveries of the year 2000, the magazine Science listed a discovery that was published at the beginning of the summer and which demonstrated this strange behavior in the macroscopic world as well. The technological and theoretical implications of the discovery have not yet been fully clarified, but they ignite the imagination of physicists and computer scientists, who hope that with the help of this discovery, they will build computers that will pale in comparison to today's supercomputers.
