A short history of the project

The idea and the desire to set this project go back to my childhood and to the novels by Asimov and Clark that I read passionately.

But to turn this old dream into something more consistent than a wild fantasy, I had to wait till I entered the highschool and got to know the HP-48G calculator. Learning the RPL language allowed my to reach worlds that were until then unattainable: data computation. After a few games, “Arkanoïd-“ or “Pacman”-like, I decided to throw myself in the realization of a far more ambitious game...

 
I decided then to develop on this calculator a game based upon one of my favourite book: 2001, A Space Oddity. But very soon, I tumbled on the difficulty of making the character of HAL-9000 believable.

The game itself rapidly turned second, as I focused my attention on the simulation of the dialogue with a machine. I started then to study whatever I could grab on this subject and developed a software called HAL-9000 v. 1.0, designed to solve mathematical problems from their formal statement.

In practical terms, you only had to type in the statement and my “HAL-9000” would split it in elementary tasks, working from key-words and their chronological order to call the calculator internal routines’, and then solve it. Thinking back to it today and remebering the ridiculous power of the HP, I can’t help feeling moved by the feat.

But it was however a simple software, simulating dialogue, and the intelligence behind it was merely mine (as an algorythm). I had to wait for the end the High School’s scientific last class to experience the Revelation...
…Which came in the form of a four-eyed philosophy teacher. This man, constantly lost in his own world, appeared to be a genuine fount of knowledge and I grew fascinated by him, to the point I told him about my project. He shown great interest and we spent many a hour discussing the possibility of reproducing the schemes of human cognition. He taught me the basics of the diferents theories of the working of the psyche, and convinced me that they were of some use in this matter.
Then I threw myself in the development of version 2.0 of my HAL-9000, learning inch by inch not to freeze my coding, and nourrishing my work by some reading in psychoanalysis. I wasted two years in faculty working mainly on this project, so that I failed my tests and decided to head to technical diploma in Informatic Development.

I learned coding, at first procedural, and then object-oriented. Backed up by a bunch of motivated friends, I transfered HAL-9000’s codes to a PC, giving birth to the version 3.0.

Stunned by such a power of computation, I decided to think it all over again till I came to version 4.0. That’s from this very moment that I began to be interested in the concept of mind-mapping that opened the road to heuristic calculation.
Nowadays, I still reckon that Caliban was born with version 4.12 of HAL-9000 that was quite amazing, for you could chat with it (by keyboard) for five minutes or so before you could know HAL from a human being.

Different versions of HAL came and went till 8.2 that I presented as a project in an exam (and which got an A )
This last, “fully operationnal” and “achieved” version of HAL was a major step for I grew aware of having coded in a heuristic form a fonctionnal conscient, according to the standards of the first freudian topic.

I decided then that I should leave the conscient aside to get to analyse the pre-conscient and the inconscient. This last got my preference, that’s why most of my work since then was looking for the way of provoking pulsions in a machine, that is to say give to it an “instinct of life”. This work lead me to realize that an inconscient must necessarily interact with the outer world, otherwise, in the freudian theory, it would collapse. This Inconscient’s codename is CBN-001 and I decided I should provide it a material interface, buildind the HHR body.

Work on CBN-001 was going on well, so I implemented HAL-9000 primary function in it. I got used to call the gathering of the pulsionnal system CBN-001, the cognitive system HAL-9000 and the HHR body by the name of Caliban. As a matter of fact, all of these systems work by the the forst freudian topic, and I just decided I should stop my researches on this topic, for I’m beginning to see its limits... Which limits I feel I won’t find in the second freudian topic.

Eager than ever to get rid of what already is and go further (despite 10 years of researches and development), I’m heading now to a theory which possibilities are infinite, accompanied by my old friend... Caliban.

Special thanks to Jeremie B (aka "Groutier") for translation