#Hal 9000 font how to#

#Hal 9000 font how to#

Or if someone moves a rover from its bay to park it by a solar panel, the AI has to understand that it’s gone, how to describe where it is and how to plan around its absence. At a basic level, for instance, that might mean knowing that if there’s no one in a room, the lights can turn off to save power but it can’t be depressurized. But it’s the “ontology” system that’s the most important.Īny AI expected to manage a spaceship or colony has to have an intuitive understanding of the people, objects and processes that make it up. A voice interaction system translates human-language queries or commands into tasks those layers can carry out. As Bonasso describes in his piece, and as is documented more thoroughly elsewhere, CASE is composed of several “layers” that govern control, routine activities and planning. There’s no reason for one single system to encompass command and control methods for robotics and a VOIP stack - yet at some point these responsibilities should be known and understood by some overarching agent.ĬASE, therefore, isn’t some kind of mega-intelligent know-it-all AI, but an architecture for organizing systems and agents that is itself an intelligent agent. Meanwhile someone may also want to initiate a video call with another part of the colony. It may be, for example, that a robot arm needs to move something on the outside of the habitat. One of the many challenges of this project is marrying the various layers of awareness and activity together.

Currently that work is being done under the auspices of TRACLabs, a research outfit in Houston.

“When people ask me what I am working on, the easiest thing to say is, ‘I am building HAL 9000,’ ” he wrote in a piece published today in the journal Science Robotics. A simple question with an answer that has been evolving for decades the International Space Station ( which just turned 20) has complex systems governing it and has grown more complex over time - but it’s far from the HAL 9000 that we all think of, and which inspired Bonasso to begin with.ġ1 moments from the International Space Station’s first 20 years The question is how to intelligently monitor and administrate a complicated environment like that of a space station, crewed spaceship or a colony on the surface of the Moon or Mars. It’s easy to forget these days that research in this area goes back to the middle of the century, with a boom in the ’80s and ’90s as computing and robotics began to proliferate. (I think that’s what happened.)ĬASE is primarily the work of Pete Bonasso, who has been working in AI and robotics for decades - since well before the current vogue of virtual assistants and natural language processing. Don’t panic! Life imitates art, to be sure, but hopefully the researchers in charge of the Cognitive Architecture for Space Exploration, or CASE, have taken the right lessons from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and their AI won’t kill us all and/or expose us to alien artifacts so we enter a state of cosmic nirvana.