This was thanks to a program written by Max Mathews, called, bluntly enough, “MUSIC.” This software enabled the machine to generate audio waveforms digitally. The 704 was also the first computer that could create music. The solution is the “floating-point”-the ability to set a relative level of precision and then expand or contract the decimal point’s position as needed. Any trade-off in precision at one end of the scale can cause catastrophic rounding errors on the other. For example, ask a computer to perform calculations on a miniature scale for engineering microelectronics and also calculate the distance in light years of a star, and the machine’s processors face a seemingly impossible contradiction. That kind of juxtaposition is easy for poets and novelists, but it is wrenchingly difficult for computers. To understand the significance of “floating points,” it helps to think about how writers like Clarke juxtaposed small, intimate human details with events on a cosmic scale. One thing that set the 704 apart from its peers was an esoteric feature called “floating point” calculations. That lab was home to arguably the most advanced computer of its day, the IBM 704 Scientific Computer. Known for such cracks as “Funding artificial intelligence is real stupidity,” and “After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy,” Pierce was conducting research at the Bell Labs facility in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Pierce was an acerbic wit and a brilliant electrical engineer, and he was also a science fiction writer. Pierce was in a unique position to offer thoughts on Clarke’s epic story of extraterrestrial life and intelligent machines.
In 1962, as he was working on 2001, Clarke visited his friend John Pierce. A few years later, in his landmark novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke created a fictional thinking machine named HAL-9000, whose mental breakdown was punctuated by that familiar song.Ĭlarke’s encounter with the singing computer came about as a fluke. The song was “Daisy Bell,” and one of the people in the audience to hear that electronically recreated tune was the author Arthur C. One such threshold was crossed very early-it was in 1961 that a computer first sang. ” As computers have met and crossed those thresholds-playing chess, painting art, carrying on conversations, winning on Jeopardy!-we stake out new thresholds. Over time, people have staked out positions that “no computer can think unless it. Douglas Rain, the actor who provided the voice for the advanced computer HAL in the film version, passed away in November.Īs a society, we have been continuously moving the goalposts of what constitutes machine intelligence. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, witnessed a computer “sing” and was inspired to add a scene to to his novel.
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