John McCarthy (computer scientist)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John McCarthy
John McCarthy at a summit in 2006
Born	September 4, 1927 (1927-09-04) (age 81) Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Residence	USA
Nationality	American
Fields	Computer Technology
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Stanford University; Dartmouth College; Princeton University
Alma mater	California Institute of Technology
Doctoral students	Ruzena Rajcsy Randall Davis Claude Green Barbara Liskov Robert Moore Francis Morris Raj Reddy
Known for	Artificial Intelligence; Circumscription; Situation calculus; LISP
Notable awards	Turing Award, 1971; Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, 2003
Religious stance	Atheist[1]

John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts), is an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and is the inventor of the Lisp programming language.

[edit] Life

John McCarthy was born in Boston on September 4, 1927 to two immigrants, John Patrick and Ida Glatt McCarthy. The family was forced to move frequently during the Depression, until McCarthy's father found work as an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in Los Angeles, California.

McCarthy showed an early aptitude for mathematics; in his teens he taught himself mathematics by studying the textbooks used at the nearby California Institute of Technology (Caltech). As a result, when he was accepted into Caltech the following year, he was able to skip the first two years of mathematics.^[2]

Receiving a B.S. in Mathematics in 1948, McCarthy initially continued his studies at Caltech. He received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1951 under Solomon Lefschetz. After short-term appointments at Princeton, Stanford University, Dartmouth, and MIT, he became a full professor at Stanford in 1962, where he remained until his retirement at the end of 2000. He is now a professor emeritus.

[edit] Work

McCarthy championed mathematical logic for Artificial Intelligence. In 1958, he proposed the advice taker, which inspired later work on question-answering and logic programming. Based on the Lambda Calculus, Lisp rapidly became the programming language of choice for AI applications after its publication in 1960 ^[3]. He helped to motivate the creation of Project MAC at MIT, but left MIT for Stanford University in 1962, where he helped set up the Stanford AI Laboratory, for many years a friendly rival to Project MAC.

In 1961, he was the first to publicly suggest (in a speech given to celebrate MIT's centennial) that computer time-sharing technology might lead to a future in which computing power and even specific applications could be sold through the utility business model (like water or electricity). This idea of a computer or information utility was very popular in the late 1960s, but faded by the mid-1970s as it became clear that the hardware, software and telecommunications technologies of the time were simply not ready. However, since 2000, the idea has resurfaced in new forms (see application service provider and cloud computing.)

From 1978 to 1986, McCarthy developed the circumscription method of nonmonotonic reasoning.

In 1982 he appears to have originated the idea of the space fountain which was further examined by Roderick Hyde.^[4]

John McCarthy often comments on world affairs on the Usenet forums. Some of his ideas can be found in his sustainability web page, which is "aimed at showing that human material progress is desirable and sustainable".

[edit] Major Publications

• McCarthy, J. 1959. Programs with common sense. In Proceedings of the Teedington Conference on the Mechanization of Thought Processes, 756-91. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
• McCarthy, J. 1960. Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine. Communications of the ACM 3(4):184-195.
• McCarthy, J. 1963a A basis for a mathematical theory of computation. In Computer Programming and formal systems. North-Holland.
• McCarthy, J. 1963b. Situations, actions, and causal laws. Technical report, Stanford University.
• McCarthy, J., and Hayes, P. J. 1969. Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of artificial intelligence. In Meltzer, B., and Michie, D., eds., Machine Intelligence 4. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 463-502.
• McCarthy, J. 1977. Epistemological problems of artificial intelligence. In IJCAI, 1038-1044.
• McCarthy, J. 1980. Circumscription: A form of non-monotonic reasoning. Artificial Intelligence 13(1-2):23-79.
• McCarthy, J. 1986. Applications of circumscription to common sense reasoning. Artificial Intelligence 28(1):89-116.
• McCarthy, J. 1990. Generality in artificial intelligence. In Lifschitz, V., ed., Formalizing Common Sense. Ablex. 226-236.
• McCarthy, J. 1993. Notes on formalizing context. In IJCAI, 555-562.
• McCarthy, J., and Buvac, S. 1997. Formalizing context: Expanded notes. In Aliseda, A.; van Glabbeek, R.; and Westerstahl, D., eds., Computing Natural Language. Stanford University. Also available as Stanford Technical Note STAN-CS-TN-94-13.
• McCarthy, J. 1998. Elaboration tolerance. In Working Papers of the Fourth International Symposium on Logical formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, Commonsense-1998.
• Costello, T., and McCarthy, J. 1999. Useful counterfactuals. Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence 3(A):51-76
• McCarthy, J. 2002. Actions and other events in situation calculus. In Fensel, D.; Giunchiglia, F.; McGuinness, D.; and Williams, M., eds., Proceedings of KR-2002, 615-628.

[edit] See also

• Frame problem
• McCarthy 91 function
• Space fountain

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Scientific Temperaments: Three Lives in Contemporary Science by Philip J. Hilts, Simon and Schuster, 1982. Lengthy profiles of John McCarthy, physicist Robert R. Wilson and geneticist Mark Ptashne.
• Machines Who Think: a personal inquiry into the history and prospects of artificial intelligence by Pamela McCorduck, 1979, second edition 2004.
• The Omni Interviews edited by Pamela Weintraub, New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1984. Collected interviews originally published in Omni magazine; contains an interview with McCarthy.

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John McCarthy

• McCarthy's Stanford home page.
• Oral history interview with John McCarthy at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. McCarthy discusses his role in the development of time-sharing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also describes his work in artificial intelligence (AI) funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, including logic-based AI (LISP) and robotics.
• Oral history interview with Marvin Minsky at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Minsky describes artificial intelligence (AI) research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including the work of John McCarthy.
• Oral history interview with Jack B. Dennis at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Dennis discusses the work of John McCarthy on time-sharing, and the influence of DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office on the development of time-sharing.
• Oral history interview with Fernando J. Corbató at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Corbató discusses computer science research, especially time-sharing, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including John McCarthy and research on time-sharing.
• McCarthy at The Mathematics Genealogy Project