A Slight Misdirection

What is a misdirection anyway?

STANLEY KUBRICK

By the way, just to show you how interpretation can sometimes be bewildering: A cryptographer went to see the film, and he said, "Oh. I get it. Each letter of HAL's name is one letter ahead of IBM. The H is one letter in front of I, the A is one letter in front of B, and the L is one letter in front of M." Now this is a pure coincidence, because HAL's name is an acronym of heuristic and algorithmic, the two methods of computer programming… an almost inconceivable coincidence. It would have taken a cryptographer to have noticed that.

Please carefully notice what Kubrick says:

• "Interpretations can sometimes be bewildering" [but "bewildering" interpretations are not necessarily wrong]
• It is "an almost inconceivable coincidence" that HAL is one letter ahead of IBM [yes, it is almost not imaginable to be a coincidence, once someone pointed it out]
• "It would have taken a cryptographer to have noticed that" [because nobody else did notice it before – is Kubrick mocking the rest of us here that we are a bit slow?]
  

With regards to misdirections: What is computer programming? Let's ask Wikipedia for help:

Computer programming is a process that leads from an original formulation of a computing problem to executable programs. It involves activities such as analysis, understanding, and generically solving such problems resulting in an algorithm, verification of requirements of the algorithm including its correctness and its resource consumption, implementation (or coding) of the algorithm in a target programming language, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code, implementation of the build system and management of derived artefacts such as machine code of computer programs.

So computer programming is "a process that results in an algorithm" – at least today. However I suspect it was the same when 2001 was made. There might have been a theory back then that implementing AI might need heuristics – but heuristics is a field in its own right (ask your spam-filter), and one would need to implement the heuristics as algorithms.

So either Kubrick is imprecise with his statements, or he is giving us misdirections – both of which is conceivable, as I want to point out. Make up your own mind about Kubrick's films.

One more thing: Of all the words in the English language, would the word "bewildering" come to your mind for the HAL=IBM interpretation? Or is it not rather bewildering (at least from Kubrick's point of view) that it took an cryptographer to come up with such an interpretation rather simple observation?