John McCarthy (1927 - 2011)
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Foolproof and Incapable of Error: RIP John McCarthy
Image: Wikipedia Perhaps it’s just me, but it’s beginning to seem lately as though we are coming to the end of an era, or is it the dawn of a new one? This week I was saddened to hear of the death of John McCarthy, a pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence — he coined the term. McCarthy invented the computer language LISP — LISt Processing — which is still used today in AI circles, and is the second oldest high level programming language. During the first Dartmouth conference in 1956 he, and his fellow organizers, came with the notion that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” To be honest, there are aspects of Artificial Intelligence that give me caution, but it is the minds behind the ideas that I find intriguing.
John McCarthy
McCarthy went on to create AI laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later at Stanford University where he became the laboratory’s director in 1965. During the 1960s he developed the concept of computer time-sharing, which allows several people to use a single, central, computer at the same time . If this approach were adopted, he claimed in 1961, “computing may some day be organised as a public utility”. The concept of time-sharing made possible the development so-called “cloud computing” (the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product).
There are two important concepts first articulated by Prof. John McCarthy of Stanford University, neither of which actually imply that computers will ever evolve to become intelligent, rational creatures. One is that electronic machines can learn functions and processes. Throughout the 56 years since this concept was introduced, it has been declared an undeniable fact numerous times, only for someone to subsequently reposition the qualifications bar for "learning." The other is that artificial intelligence (AI) is implied by any process which, when done well and correctly, appears to have required human intelligence. In other words, like legislative gridlock, you don't have to see it yourself to know it exists.
John McCarthy (1927 - 2011), Believer in Humanity
October has been a tough month for the computing community. On the heels of the deaths of both Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie, Stanford has confirmed that John McCarthy, creator of the programming language Lisp and a founder of AI, passed away on Sunday. He was 84. McCarthy’s influence began at Dartmouth, where he coined the term “artificial intelligence” while planning the first conference in the field , held in 1956. Though he later wished he had named the field differently—“computational intelligence” would have been more apt, if less alluring—McCarthy went on to make significant contributions to the field, creating Lisp , the programming language of choice for many AI applications.
(Remembering (John (McCarthy (1927 - 2011))))
Today, we mark the death of another giant of programming, "Uncle" John McCarthy. Like the subject of this month's earlier commemoration, Dennis Ritchie , McCarthy created an elegant programming language whose syntax persists today. He also foresaw the need for several technologies that have subsequently been widely adopted in software development. His most notable contribution by most measures is Lisp, the language he designed in the late 1950s and that today still looks revolutionary in its syntax, despite our long familiarity with it. While Lisp was originally designed for artificial intelligence (a term that McCarthy invented), its embrace of the functional programming model is at last gaining traction in mainstream programming and pushing into the general business programming world.
John McCarthy, in Memoriam
Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).
Lisp Cycles
John McCarthy - Father of AI and Lisp - Dies at 84
John McCarthy, the man who coined the term 'artificial intelligence' When IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer won its famous chess rematch with then world champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997, the victory was hailed far and wide as a triumph of artificial intelligence. But John McCarthy — the man who coined the term and pioneered the field of AI research — didn’t see it that way. As far back as the mid-60s, chess was called the “Drosophila of artificial intelligence” — a reference to the fruit flies biologists used to uncover the secrets of genetics — and McCarthy believed his successors in AI research had taken the analogy too far.
Father of artificial intelligence dies at 84
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The cause was complications of heart disease, his daughter Sarah McCarthy said. Dr. McCarthy’s career followed the arc of modern computing. Trained as a mathematician, he was responsible for seminal advances in the field and was often called the father of computer time-sharing , a major development of the 1960s that enabled many people and organizations to draw simultaneously from a single computer source, like a mainframe, without having to own one.
John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011) [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist . He invented the term " artificial intelligence " (AI), developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized timesharing , and was very influential in the early development of AI. McCarthy received many accolades and honors, including the Turing Award for his contributions to the topic of AI, the United States National Medal of Science , and the Kyoto Prize .
John McCarthy
Lisp (programming language)
Influenced CLU , Dylan , Falcon , Forth , Haskell , Io , Ioke , JavaScript , Logo , Lua , Mathematica , MDL , ML , Nu , OPS5 , Perl , Python , Qi , Rebol , Racket , Ruby , Smalltalk , Tcl Lisp (historically, LISP ) is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish prefix notation. [ 1 ] Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older (by one year). Like Fortran, Lisp has changed a great deal since its early days, and a number of dialects have existed over its history.Garbage collection (computer science)
In computer science , garbage collection ( GC ) is a form of automatic memory management . The garbage collector , or just collector , attempts to reclaim garbage , or memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use by the program . Garbage collection was invented by John McCarthy around 1959 to solve problems in Lisp . [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Garbage collection is often portrayed as the opposite of manual memory management , which requires the programmer to specify which objects to deallocate and return to the memory system. However, many systems use a combination of approaches, including other techniques such as stack allocation and region inference .Artificial intelligence ( AI ) is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" [ 1 ] where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success. [ 2 ] John McCarthy , who coined the term in 1956, [ 3 ] defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." [ 4 ] AI research is highly technical and specialized, deeply divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other. [ 5 ] Subfields have grown up around particular institutions, the work of individual researchers, the solution of specific problems and the application of widely differing tools.