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| McCarthy, John | ||
| (1927 - ) John McCarthy is recognized as one of the fathers of AI (artificial intelligence). He developed the programming language LISP (list processing), which is used specifically for AI applications, in 1958 at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). McCarthy believed that computers could reason like humans and that the LISP language represents common-sense knowledge. McCarthy was a Boston-born mathematician who attributed his early interest in science to his family’s political views. He adopted their belief that technology was good for humanity. This early influence resulted in an extraordinary addiction to mathematics. When he was in high school, he purchased college-level freshman and sophomore calculus books used for the mathematics courses at the California Institute of Technology and completed all the exercises effortlessly. In 1944, he enrolled at Cal Tech and shortly after was drafted for service into World War II. In 1945, he returned to Cal Tech and earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics. In 1948, after hearing mathematical logician and computer designer John von Neumann deliver a speech on self-replicating automata (machines capable of creating copies of themselves), McCarthy’s interest turned to the relationship between human intelligence and machine intelligence. Following his mentor Von Neumann, McCarthy enrolled at Princeton University in 1949 to work on his doctorate degree. His first attempts at modeling human intelligence on a machine discouraged him, so he requested funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in the mid-1950s to explore the proposition that a machine could simulate intelligence, and the term “artificial intelligence” was born. The Rockefeller Foundation grant was used to sponsor the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, which took place in 1956 at Dartmouth College where McCarthy was teaching at the time. McCarthy’s expectations of the conference proved less productive than he had hoped, but this event was later described as a landmark occasion in the history of computer science because it was the first assembly of individuals pursuing the creation of a truly intelligent machine, and it established AI as a separate field of study within computer science. After the conference, McCarthy focused on a computer that played games and completed other tasks. He developed the computer language LISP to achieve his goal. LISP manipulates symbols for objects, rather than performing arithmetic on numbers, and uses lists of instructions to represent and manipulate logical deductions. Based on logic statements such as “and” and “or,” rules are formulated for manipulating the lists, which are then combined into statements that can represent standard mathematical structures or sentence structures. LISP and variations of LISP are still used in most expert systems and natural language programs today. By the late 1980s, microcomputers became powerful enough to run LISP, which opened the language to everyone instead of limiting it to only the specialized LISP computers of the past. McCarthy is currently a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. He has published hundreds of papers on computers and AI, which can be found on his Web site at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc, plus the book “Formalizing Common Sense.” In 1971, he received the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Turing Award (a prestigious award for contributions of a technical computing nature). McCarthy is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Science. | ||
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