Poole Versus HAL 9000 (chess)

Poole Versus HAL 9000 (chess)

Poole versus HAL 9000 is a fictional chess game in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the movie, the astronaut Frank Poole is seen playing chess with the HAL 9000 supercomputer. As HAL is supposed to be infallible, no one is surprised when HAL soundly defeats Poole (though the novel mentions that HAL is programmed to win only 50% of the time in order for there to be some point in the astronauts ever playing).

The director Stanley Kubrick was a passionate chess player, so unlike many chess scenes shown in other films, the position and analysis make sense. The actual game seems to come from the tournament game between A. Roesch and W. Schlage, Hamburg 1910.