In the film, HAL is depicted as being capable not only of speech recognition, and natural language understanding but also lip reading[?].
Many people think the name was taken from IBM (because H precedes I, A precedes B and L precedes M alphabetically). Arthur C. Clarke denied such wordplay (even getting one of his characters to deny it in the sequel 2010 Odyssey Two) and says that the name actually means Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. Many find this denial unconvincing. (Note that the HAL 9000 nameplate is modelled on similar nameplates for IBM computers). A similar alphabetic shift is behind the abbreviation WNT for Windows NT.
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