John McCarthy (computer scientist)
John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence.[1] He co-authored the document that coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the programming language family Lisp, significantly influenced the design of the language ALGOL, popularized time-sharing, and invented garbage collection.
John McCarthy
September 4, 1927
October 24, 2011 (aged 84)
Turing Award (1971)
Computer Pioneer Award (1985)
IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1985)
Kyoto Prize (1988)
National Medal of Science (1990)
Benjamin Franklin Medal (2003)
McCarthy spent most of his career at Stanford University.[2] He received many accolades and honors, such as the 1971 Turing Award for his contributions to the topic of AI,[3] the United States National Medal of Science, and the Kyoto Prize.
Early life and education[edit]
John McCarthy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 4, 1927, to an Irish immigrant father and a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant mother,[4] John Patrick and Ida (Glatt) McCarthy. The family was obliged to relocate frequently during the Great Depression, until McCarthy's father found work as an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in Los Angeles, California. His father came from Cromane, a small fishing village in County Kerry, Ireland.[5] His mother died in 1957.[6]
Both parents were active members of the Communist Party during the 1930s, and they encouraged learning and critical thinking. Before he attended high school, McCarthy became interested in science by reading a translation of 100,000 Whys, a Russian popular science book for children.[7] He was fluent in the Russian language and made friends with Russian scientists during multiple trips to the Soviet Union, but distanced himself after making visits to the Soviet Bloc, which led to him becoming a conservative Republican.[8]
McCarthy graduated from Belmont High School two years early[9] and was accepted into Caltech in 1944.
He showed an early aptitude for mathematics; during his teens, he taught himself college math by studying the textbooks used at the nearby California Institute of Technology (Caltech). As a result, he was able to skip the first two years of math at Caltech.[10]
He was suspended from Caltech for failure to attend physical education courses.[11] He then served in the US Army and was readmitted, receiving a BS in mathematics in 1948.[12]
It was at Caltech that he attended a lecture by John von Neumann that inspired his future endeavors.
McCarthy completed his graduate studies at Caltech before moving to Princeton University, where he received a PhD in mathematics in 1951 with his dissertation "Projection operators and partial differential equations", under the supervision of Donald C. Spencer.[13]
Academic career[edit]
After short-term appointments at Princeton and Stanford University, McCarthy became an assistant professor at Dartmouth in 1955.
A year later, he moved to MIT as a research fellow in the autumn of 1956. By the end of his years at MIT he was already affectionately referred to as "Uncle John" by his students.[14]
In 1962, he became a full professor at Stanford, where he remained until his retirement in 2000.
McCarthy championed mathematics such as lambda calculus and invented logics for achieving common sense in artificial intelligence.
Other activities[edit]
McCarthy often commented on world affairs on the Usenet forums. Some of his ideas can be found in his sustainability Web page,[25] which is "aimed at showing that human material progress is desirable and sustainable". McCarthy was an avid book reader, an optimist, and a staunch supporter of free speech. His best Usenet interaction is visible in rec.arts.books archives. He actively attended SF Bay Area dinners in Palo Alto of r.a.b. readers, called rab-fests. He went on to defend free speech criticism involving European ethnic jokes at Stanford.[26]
McCarthy saw the importance of mathematics and mathematics education. His Usenet .sig for years was, "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense"; his license plate cover read, similarly, "Do the arithmetic or be doomed to talk nonsense."[27][28] He advised 30 PhD graduates.[29]
His 2001 short story "The Robot and the Baby"[30] farcically explored the question of whether robots should have (or simulate having) emotions, and anticipated aspects of Internet culture and social networking that became increasingly prominent during ensuing decades.[31]
Personal life[edit]
McCarthy was married three times. His second wife was Vera Watson, a programmer and mountaineer who died in 1978 attempting to scale Annapurna I Central as part of an all-women expedition. He later married Carolyn Talcott, a computer scientist at Stanford and later SRI International.[32][33]
McCarthy declared himself an atheist in a speech about artificial intelligence at Stanford Memorial Church.[34][35][36] Raised as a Communist, he became a conservative Republican after a visit to Czechoslovakia in 1968 after the Soviet invasion.[37] He died at his home in Stanford on October 24, 2011.[38]
Philosophy of artificial intelligence[edit]
In 1979 McCarthy wrote an article[39] entitled "Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines". In it he wrote, "Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem-solving performance." In 1980 the philosopher John Searle responded with his famous Chinese Room Argument,[40][15] disagreeing with McCarthy and taking the stance that machines cannot have beliefs simply because they are not conscious. Searle argues that machines lack intentionality. A vast amount of literature has been written in support of one side or the other.