[NEWS] Five sci-fi links: HAL 9000, Space Seed on VHS, baseball on DS9, Civilization, AIs doing D&D

[rfmcdonald]

• How did the movie version of HAL 9000, from 2001, come about? And why does HAL sound so Canadian? The National Post reports.


• The official Star Trek website explains how the release of the episode "Space Seed" on VHS helped change the videocassette market of the 1980s, here.


• Deadspin explains how the central role played by the sport of baseball in Deep Space 9 underlined the ways in which that show was atypical Trek.


• Rock Paper Shotgun examines how many long-run civilization-building games, like Civilization, do a poor job of depicting stagnation and decline, and what this failure says about us now.


• The idea that the game that artificial intelligences need to learn to play is not chess but D&D--that games involving roleplaying are good tests for general intelligence--seems obvious to me. Aeon has it.