I missed any earlier reports...
John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 23, 2011)
I feared this might come in 3's this month. First we lose Steve Jobs (Apple Inc. co-founder), then C programming creator and UNIX co-developer Dennis Ritchie. And Now....
A pioneer in artificial intelligence, John McCarthy passes away at 84.
How important was/is he?
(sources: Associated Press & Wikipedia)
- John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence in a 1955 research proposal. He said "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"
- In 1956, he organized the first international conference to focus on artificial intelligence.
- In 1958, he proposed the advice taker, which inspired later work on question-answering and logic programming
- John invented the programming language Lisp in 1958, which paved the way for voice recognition technology.
- 1959, he invented garbage collection to solve problems in LISP. Based on the lambda calculus, LISP rapidly became the programming language of choice for AI applications after its publication in 1960
- He created the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Standford Artificial Intelligence Lab, and served as it's director from 1965 to 1980.
- McCarthy also developed the concept of computer time-sharing, which allowed multiple users to interact with a single computer. Laying the foundation for what we now know as "Cloud Computing".
McCarthy is also credited with developing an early form of time-sharing. 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."
- He received a doctorate in math from Princeton in 1951. He was a professor at Princeton until 1953. Also taught at MIT and Dartmouth before settling at Stanford in 1962 until his retirement at the end of 2000.
- Received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- From 1978 to 1986, McCarthy developed the circumscription method of non-monotonic reasoning
- In 1982 he appears to have originated the idea of the space fountain, a form of "space elevator", which was further examined by Roderick Hyde
- His 2001 short story "The Robot and the Baby" lightheartedly explored the question of whether robots should have (or simulate having) emotions, and anticipated aspects of Internet culture and social networking that became more prominent in the ensuing decade.
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Awards & Honors
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Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (1971).
Kyoto Prize (1988).
National Medal of Science (USA) in Mathematical, Statistical, and Computational Sciences (1991).
Inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum (1999)
Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute (2003).
Inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's Hall of Fame (2011), for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems".
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