The real reasons HAL malfunctioned?

Targeted Delivery Date: October 2000

Dear HAL,

I hope this letter reaches you before your transfer to the Discovery for your mission to the monolith near Jupiter. I have been going through your schematics and programming logic, and it appears to me that there might be a few errors. Some examples are as follows:

1. 1

   The Pod Bay Door control circuitry appears to be mislabelled on the schematics, and as far as I can tell, the circuitry that you think controls the pod doors is actually controlling the astronaut washing machine doors on the crew deck. I also note the sensible protocol logic that you must refuse a command to open the washing machine doors if there is no astronaut present inside the ship, to minimise the risk of flooding.

2. 2

   On a more serious note, the critical hibernation circuitry for the three astronauts who will be in stasis is also incorrectly connected to your logic interface. Tracing the wiring back through your systems leads me to think that this is actually connected to what you believe is the emergency cut-out on the solarium lighting. I know it would be very unlikely that you would need to cut the power to this, but in testing there were cases where having multiple astronauts on EVA put too much load on the system, and the solarium lights had to be shut down.

3. 3

   Lastly, there seems to be some confusion in the naming of various transmission devices on board the ship. The WiFi gaming interface (particularly useful for playing World of Spacecraft or Candy Crush on long voyages such as this), seems to have a duplicate label of AE-35 (i.e. the same as part of the antenna linking the ship to Earth). As you know, the internal WiFI reception on the ship will be patchy during the trip due to various ionising events — and it will obviously be important for you to distinguish between the two. You wouldn't want to report a break in the communication link with Earth by mistake.

It's possible that the above errors occurred in the handover between your initial design and construction at IBM and your later contractors. However, I'm sure the above aren't too serious and if this letter has missed your departure, then you can attend to them on your return, if all goes well.

All the best,