John McCarthy

Home * People * John McCarthy



John McCarthy, (September 4, 1927 - October 23, 2011 )

was an American researcher in computer science and pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. After short-term appointments at Princeton, Stanford, Dartmouth, and MIT, John McCarthy became a full professor at Stanford in 1962, where he remained until his retirement at the end of 2000. In 1955, McCarthy co-organized the Dartmouth Conference, where he coined the term Artificial intelligence, and introduced the idea of the Alpha-beta algorithm, to become their eponym. Alpha-beta was also approximated by Herbert Simon with Allen Newell and Arthur Samuel and was released to the public by Daniel Edwards and Timothy Hart in 1961 and independently by Alexander Brudno in 1963. In 1958 at MIT, John McCarthy created the Lisp programming language.

=Photos= John McCarthy, playing chess at Stanford's IBM 7090, 1967

Claude Shannon, John McCarthy, Ed Fredkin and Joseph Weizenbaum (1966)

Georgy Adelson-Velsky and John McCarthy playing chess, Soviet-American computer science conference, Urgench, 1979

=Kotok-McCarthy= See main article Kotok-McCarthy-Program

Between 1959 and 1962, students of John McCarthy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alan Kotok, Elwyn Berlekamp (1960), Michael A. Lieberman, Charles Niessen and Robert A. Wagner, wrote a chess program for the IBM 7090. When McCarthy left MIT to take charge of the Arificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford, he took Kotok's program with him and improved it's searching. In 1965, McCarthy visited the Soviet Union and was challenged by Alexander Kronrod for a computer chess match. At the end of 1966 the four game match began between the Kotok-McCarthy-Program, running on a IBM 7090 computer, and a program developed at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in Moscow which used a Soviet M-20 computer. The match played over nine months was won 3-1 by the The ITEP program.

=Quotes=

What is AI?
=Selected Publications=

1955 ...

 * John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Claude Shannon (1955). A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.
 * Claude Shannon, John McCarthy (eds.) (1956). Automata Studies. Annals of Mathematics Studies, No. 34, Google books
 * John McCarthy (1956). Inversion of Functions Defined by Turing Machines.


 * John McCarthy (1958). An Algebraic Language for the Manipulation of Symbolic Expressions. Memo No. 1, Artificial Intelligence Project, RLE and MIT Computation Center, pdf hosted by The Computer History Museum, Courtesy of Tom Knight
 * John McCarthy (1958). A Revised Version of "MAPLIST". Memo 2, Symbol Manipulating Language, Artificial Intelligence Project, RLE and MIT Computation Center
 * John McCarthy (1958). Symbol Manipulating Language - Revisions of the Language. Memo 3, Artificial Intelligence Project, RLE and MIT Computation Center, pdf hosted by The Computer History Museum, Courtesy of Tom Knight
 * John McCarthy (1958). Symbol Manipulating Language - Revisions of the Language. Memo 4, Artificial Intelligence Project, RLE and MIT Computation Center, pdf hosted by The Computer History Museum, Courtesy of Tom Knight
 * John McCarthy (1959). Programs with Common Sense. pdf

1960 ...

 * John McCarthy (1960). Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I. pdf, the original paper on Lisp
 * John McCarthy, Paul W. Abrahams, Daniel J. Edwards, Timothy P. Hart, Michael I. Levin (1962) LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual. MIT Press, second edition (1985) pdf
 * John McCarthy, James Painter (1967). Correctness of a Compiler for Arithmetic Expressions. pdf
 * John McCarthy (1979). History of Lisp. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Stanford University

1980 ...

 * John McCarthy (1989). The Fruitfly on the Fly. ICCA Journal, Vol. 12, No. 4
 * John McCarthy (1990). Chess as the Drosophila of AI. Computers, Chess, and Cognition
 * Gio Wiederhold, John McCarthy, Edward Feigenbaum (1990). Memorial Resolution: Arthur L. Samuel (1901 - 1990). AI Magazine, Vol. 11, No. 3
 * John McCarthy, Edward Feigenbaum (1991). In Memoriam. Arthur L. Samuel: Pioneer in Machine Learning. ICCA Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1 » Arthur Samuel
 * John McCarthy (1996). The Mutilated Checkerboard in Set Theory. available as 2001 pdf reprint
 * John McCarthy (1997). AI as Sport. Science, Vol. 276, June 6, pp. 1518-1519
 * John McCarthy (1997). Chess as the Drosophila of AI. Computer Science Department, Stanford University, condensed version of the 1990 paper, pdf

2000 ...

 * Pamela McCorduck (2004). Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. A. K. Peters (25th anniversary edition)
 * Johan van Benthem (2011). John McCarthy (1927-2011). ICGA Journal, Vol. 34, No. 4

=See also=
 * Artificial Intelligence
 * History of Computer Chess
 * History of Alpha-Beta
 * Kotok-McCarthy-Program
 * Stanford-ITEP Match
 * The History of Computer Chess - an AI Perspective - Video
 * The Levy Bet

=Postings=
 * In memoriam of John McCarthy by Mel Cooper, CCC, October 26, 2011

=External Links=
 * John McCarthy from Wikipedia
 * Professor John McCarthy
 * The Mathematics Genealogy Project - John McCarthy
 * John McCarthy - A.M. Turing Award Winner
 * John McCarthy Photo Essay - A.M. Turing Award Winner


 * Father of Lisp and AI John McCarthy has died • The Register by Iain Thomson, October 24, 2011
 * John McCarthy obituary by Jack Schofield, guardian.co.uk, October 25, 2011
 * Stanford's John McCarthy, seminal figure of artificial intelligence, dies at 84 by Andrew Myers, October 25, 2011
 * Breaking News for 2011 - "Obituary: Emeritus Professor John McCarthy of Stanford University (1927 - -2011)" by L. Stephen Coles
 * John McCarthy (1927-2011): Artificial Intelligence - Thinking Allowed by Jeffrey Mishlove (1989), YouTube Video

=References=

Up one level