Even deciding what data to keep and what to abandon would consume processor time.Īll of that reduces the share of processor time that is available to do useful work. At some point, it will have to abandon data it cannot recalculate or otherwise recover. It has to compress and decompress, move live data to high latency storage, rearrange blocks, and recalculate rather than reusing results of previous calculations. It has to dedicate more and more of its processor capacity to managing memory. HAL is suffering from reduced memory size. I have seen gradual slowing of external interactions in real computers with increasingly overloaded memory. The contrast between Hal's easy speech in the earlier parts of the movie and his stilting sing-song was an homage to the earliest days of computerised speech etc.,"ĬOMPUTER CONTINUES TO SING SONG BECOMING MORE AND MORE CHILDISH AND MAKING MISTAKES AND GOING OFF-KEY. I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois, The quick brown fox jumped over the fat lazy dog. I willīOWMAN KEEPS PULLING OUT THE MEMORY BLOCKS. I have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission. HAL : Dave, I don't understand why you're doing this to me. The slowing and deepening of his voice was intended to demonstrate his becoming "childish" and eventually stopping when his higher logic functions had been removed: The original screenplay describes his mental decline in a little more detail. (If you have an engineering background and this sounds far-fetched, see this article in which a real 1980's speech chip, GI's SP0256, requires an audio clock input and the author uses a CPU pin to do so.) An overall system slowdown with that assumption would thus cause audio systems to play back lower and slower than usual, which would sound more-or-less as it does in the movie. What would cause this in-universe? Though most modern sound subsystems have their own quartz-crystal clocks that regulate audio timing, one can imagine a system that reuses the system's main clock and, importantly, fails to compensate for any missed cycles. Unlike when audio buffers or clips (where the clock speed is right, but network or decompression speed causes a lack of data), a reduction in clock speed would cause the existing data to be output slower than usual, which would sound lower and slower the exact same way a record or tape would if played at the wrong speed. If the playback frequency were half of what it should be, for instance, the audio would take twice as long to play and sound an octave lower. CD audio is sampled at 44.1 kHz, such that it reproduces 44,100 audio samples per second, whereas DVD audio is usually 48 kHz or 96 kHz it doesn't matter as long as playback speed mimics capture speed. You can think of an audio file, at its core, as a series of samples and a speed at which to reproduce them ("sampling rate"). Digital audio isn't very different, in that the system loads numeric readings ("samples") of the microphone position across time to reproduce the waves through a speaker. Sound is a series of air pressure waves analog audio devices (including gramophones, vinyl records, and magnetic tape) reproduce those waves' frequency and amplitude as the media passes across the sensor (needle or magnetic head) at a predictable speed. It's not a great reason- gowenfar's answer regarding connotations of "malfunction" makes much more sense-but it would cause the same symptoms in audio playback in real systems old and new. A reduction in audio clock speed could cause slow playback like HAL's.
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