Historical Figure
John McCarthy
d. 2011
American scientist (1927–2011)
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Biography
John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence, and part of just a small group of artificial intelligence researchers in the 1950s and 1960s. He co-authored the proposal for the Dartmouth workshop which coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), led the development of the symbolic programming language family Lisp and had a large influence in the language ALGOL, popularized time-sharing, and created garbage collection.
In Their Own Words (5)
It's difficult to be rigorous about whether a machine really 'knows', 'thinks', etc., because we're hard put to define these things. We understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming.
"The Little Thoughts of Thinking Machines", Psychology Today, December 1983, pp. 46–49. Reprinted in Formalizing Common Sense: Papers By John McCarthy, 1990, , 1983
Program designers have a tendency to think of the users as idiots who need to be controlled. They should rather think of their program as a servant, whose master, the user, should be able to control it. If designers and programmers think about the apparent mental qualities that their programs will have, they'll create programs that are easier and pleasanter — more humane — to deal with.
"The Little Thoughts of Thinking Machines", Psychology Today, December 1983, pp. 46–49. Reprinted in Formalizing Common Sense: Papers By John McCarthy, 1990, , 1983
Whenever we write an axiom, a critic can say that the axiom is true only in a certain context. With a little ingenuity the critic can usually devise a more general context in which the precise form of the axiom doesn't hold. [...] There simply isn't a most general context.
"Generality in Artificial Intelligence" (1971–1987), ACM Turing Award Lectures: The First Twenty Years, ACM Press, 1987, , 1971
When there's a will to fail, obstacles can be found.
John McCarthy (1983), quoted in The Sayings of John McCarthy, at www-formal.stanford.edu, March 1, 2007. Also quoted in Keith Cary Curtis (1996) After the Software Wars. p. 167 , 1983
In 1936 the notion of a computable function was clarified by Turing, and he showed the existence of universal computers that, with an appropriate program, could compute anything computed by any other computer. [...] In some subconscious sense even the sales departments of computer manufacturers are aware of this, and they do not advertise magic instructions that cannot be simulated on competitors machines, but only that their machines are faster, cheaper, have more memory, or are easier to program.
"Towards a Mathematical Science of Computation", Information Processing 1962: Proceedings of IFIP Congress 62, ed. Cicely M. Popplewell (Amsterdam, 1963), pp. 21–28 , 1936
Timeline
The story of John McCarthy, told in moments.
Organized the Dartmouth Conference, the workshop where he coined the term "artificial intelligence." Eight weeks, ten researchers. The field didn't exist before. It did after.
Created LISP, the second-oldest high-level programming language still in use. It became the standard language for AI research for decades. Based on lambda calculus.
Won the Turing Award for his contributions to AI. Also invented the concept of computer time-sharing, which let multiple users share a single machine. The ancestor of cloud computing.
Died at his home in Stanford, California. Age 84. He'd spent his last years at Stanford's AI lab, the one he founded in 1963.
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