John McCarthy (computer scientist)

McCarthy was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized timesharing, invented garbage collection, and was very influential in the early development of AI.

The field of AI research was born at a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956, where the term "Artificial Intelligence" was coined by John McCarthy to distinguish the field from cybernetics and escape the influence of the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener.

He coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized timesharing, invented garbage collection, and was very influential in the early development of AI.

John McCarthy developed Lisp in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He received many accolades and honors, such as the 1971 Turing Award for his contributions to the topic of AI, the United States National Medal of Science, and the Kyoto Prize.

He coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized timesharing, invented garbage collection, and was very influential in the early development of AI.

McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in 1955, and organized the famous Dartmouth conference in Summer 1956.

In 1955, John McCarthy, then a young Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College, decided to organize a group to clarify and develop ideas about thinking machines.

John McCarthy is one of the "founding fathers" of artificial intelligence, together with Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert A. Simon.

He joined the staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1958, and a year later he and John McCarthy initiated what is, named the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Around 1959, he invented so-called "garbage collection" methods to solve problems in Lisp.

Garbage collection was invented by John McCarthy around 1959 to simplify manual memory management in Lisp.

In 1958, he proposed the advice taker, which inspired later work on question-answering and logic programming.

Advocates of declarative representations were notably working at Stanford, associated with John McCarthy, Bertram Raphael and Cordell Green, and in Edinburgh, with John Alan Robinson (an academic visitor from Syracuse University), Pat Hayes, and Robert Kowalski.

He coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized timesharing, invented garbage collection, and was very influential in the early development of AI.

The first project to implement time-sharing of user programs was initiated by John McCarthy at MIT in 1959, initially planned on a modified IBM 704, and later on an additionally modified IBM 709 (one of the first computers powerful enough for time-sharing).

In 1958, McCarthy served on an ACM Ad hoc Committee on Languages that became part of the committee that designed ALGOL 60.

McCarthy was instrumental in creation of three of the very earliest time-sharing systems (Compatible Time-Sharing System, BBN Time-Sharing System, and Dartmouth Time Sharing System).

Kurtz approached Kemeny in either 1961 or 1962, with the following proposal : all Dartmouth students would have access to computing, it should be free and open-access, and this could be accomplished via a creating a time-sharing system (which Kurtz had learned about from colleague John McCarthy at MIT, who suggested "why don't you guys do timesharing?").

McCarthy was instrumental in creation of three of the very earliest time-sharing systems (Compatible Time-Sharing System, BBN Time-Sharing System, and Dartmouth Time Sharing System).

John McCarthy wrote a memo about that at MIT, after which a preliminary study committee and a working committee were established at MIT, to develop time sharing.

He helped to motivate the creation of Project MAC at MIT when he worked there, and at Stanford University, he helped establish the Stanford AI Laboratory, for many years a friendly rival to Project MAC.

An "AI Group" including Marvin Minsky (the director), John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp) and a talented community of computer programmers was incorporated into the newly formed Project MAC.

In 1966, McCarthy and his team at Stanford wrote a computer program used to play a series of chess games with counterparts in the Soviet Union; McCarthy's team lost two games and drew two games (see Kotok-McCarthy).

Between 1959 and 1962, classmates Elwyn Berlekamp, Alan Kotok, Michael Lieberman, Charles Niessen and Robert A. Wagner wrote the program while students of John McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1958, he proposed the advice taker, which inspired later work on question-answering and logic programming.

The advice taker was a hypothetical computer program, proposed by John McCarthy in his 1958 paper "Programs with Common Sense".

From 1978 to 1986, McCarthy developed the circumscription method of non-monotonic reasoning.

Circumscription is a non-monotonic logic created by John McCarthy to formalize the common sense assumption that things are as expected unless otherwise specified.

McCarthy was exceptionally intelligent, and graduated from Belmont High School two years early.

He helped to motivate the creation of Project MAC at MIT when he worked there, and at Stanford University, he helped establish the Stanford AI Laboratory, for many years a friendly rival to Project MAC.

SAIL was started in 1963 by John McCarthy, after he moved from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Stanford.

He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the institution in 1951 as a student of Solomon Lefschetz.

He helped to motivate the creation of Project MAC at MIT when he worked there, and at Stanford University, he helped establish the Stanford AI Laboratory, for many years a friendly rival to Project MAC.

John McCarthy and Patrick J. Hayes defined this problem in their 1969 article, Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence.

The McCarthy 91 function is a recursive function, defined by the computer scientist John McCarthy as a test case for formal verification within computer science.

In computer science and recursion theory the McCarthy Formalism (1963) of computer scientist John McCarthy clarifies the notion of recursive functions by use of the IF-THEN-ELSE construction common to computer science, together with four of the operators of primitive recursive functions: zero, successor, equality of numbers and composition.

His colleague Lester Earnest told the Los Angeles Times: "The Internet would not have happened nearly as soon as it did except for the fact that John initiated the development of time-sharing systems. We keep inventing new names for time-sharing. It came to be called servers ... Now we call it cloud computing. That is still just time-sharing. John started it."

Under founding director John McCarthy, he soon became deeply involved with the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPAnet) startup committee.