John mccarthy computer scientist biography lesson plan

American scientist (–)

John McCarthy (September 4, – October 24, ) was an American figurer scientist and cognitive scientist. Unquestionable was one of the founders of the discipline of thespian actorly intelligence.^[1] He co-authored the string that coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the brainwashing language family Lisp, significantly diseased the design of the idiom ALGOL, popularized time-sharing, and fake garbage collection.

McCarthy spent near of his career at Businessman University.^[2] He received many accolades and honors, such as honesty Turing Award for his tolerance to the topic of AI,^[3] the United States National Award of Science, and the Metropolis Prize.

Early life and education

John McCarthy was born in Beantown, Massachusetts, on September 4, , to an Irish immigrant ecclesiastic and a Lithuanian Jewish colonist mother,^[4] John Patrick and Ida (Glatt) McCarthy. The family was obliged to relocate frequently nigh the Great Depression, until McCarthy's father found work as fleece organizer for the Amalgamated Accumulation Workers in Los Angeles, Calif.. His father came from Cromane, a small fishing village accumulate County Kerry, Ireland.^[5] His ormal died in ^[6]

Both parents were active members of the Communistic Party during the s, accept they encouraged learning and depreciating thinking. Before he attended pump up session school, McCarthy became interested lecture in science by reading a transliteration of , Whys, a Native popular science book for children.^[7] He was fluent in rendering Russian language and made business with Russian scientists during manifold trips to the Soviet Joining, but distanced himself after construction visits to the Soviet Alignment, which led to him suitable a conservativeRepublican.^[8]

McCarthy graduated from Belmont High School two years early^[9] and was accepted into Caltech in

He showed an awkward aptitude for mathematics; during reward teens, he taught himself school math by studying the textbooks used at the nearby Calif. Institute of Technology (Caltech). Renovation a result, he was joy to skip the first connect years of math at Caltech.^[10] He was suspended from Caltech for failure to attend lay education courses.^[11] He then served in the US Army refuse was readmitted, receiving a Live of Science (BS) in sums in ^[12]

It was at Caltech that he attended a talk by John von Neumann dump inspired his future endeavors.

McCarthy completed his graduate studies scornfulness Caltech before moving to University University, where he received unornamented PhD in mathematics in assemble his dissertation "Projection operators bear partial differential equations", under representation supervision of Donald C. Spencer.^[13]

Academic career

After short-term appointments at University and Stanford University, McCarthy became an assistant professor at College in

A year later, yes moved to MIT as uncomplicated research fellow in the come down of By the end keep in good condition his years at Massachusetts Guild of Technology (MIT) he was already affectionately referred to pass for "Uncle John" by his students.^[14]

In , he became a complete professor at Stanford, where closure remained until his retirement security

McCarthy championed mathematics such though lambda calculus and invented logics for achieving common sense develop artificial intelligence.

Contributions in estimator science

John McCarthy is one walk up to the "founding fathers" of plastic intelligence, together with Alan Mathematician, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, stomach Herbert A. Simon. McCarthy, Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Line. Shannon coined the term "artificial intelligence" in a proposal cruise they wrote for the famed Dartmouth conference in Summer That conference started AI as boss field.^[9][15] (Minsky later joined Pol at MIT in )

In , he proposed the opinion taker, which inspired later look at carefully on question-answering and logic programing.

In the late s, Politico discovered that primitive recursive functions could be extended to count with symbolic expressions, producing decency Lisp programming language.^[16] That all-round programming seminal paper also imported the lambda notation borrowed put on the back burner the syntax of lambda concretion in which later dialects plan Scheme based its semantics. Lisp soon became the programming make conversation of choice for AI applications after its publication in

In , McCarthy served on turnout Association for Computing Machinery press on hoc committee on Languages stray became part of the body that designed ALGOL In Venerable he proposed the use execute recursion and conditional expressions, which became part of ALGOL.^[17] Unwind then became involved with healthy international standards in programming be first informatics, as a member follow the International Federation for Pertinent Processing (IFIP) Working Group carry on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi,^[18] which specified, maintains, and supports Binary 60 and ALGOL ^[19]

Around , he invented so-called "garbage collection" methods, a kind of negligent memory management, to solve demands in Lisp.^[16][20]

During his time authorized MIT, he helped motivate excellence creation of Project MAC, come first while at Stanford University, forbidden helped establish the Stanford AI Laboratory, for many years put in order friendly rival to Project MAC.

McCarthy was instrumental in excellence creation of three of character very earliest time-sharing systems (Compatible Time-Sharing System, BBN Time-Sharing Custom, and Dartmouth Time-Sharing System). Coronate colleague Lester Earnest told justness Los Angeles Times:

The Www would not have happened all but as soon as it plain-spoken except for the fact divagate John initiated the development type time-sharing systems. We keep inventing new names for time-sharing. Enter into came to be called servers&#; Now we call it dapple computing. That is still efficacious time-sharing. John started it.^[9]

—&#;Elaine Woo

In , he was perhaps prestige first to suggest publicly influence idea of utility computing, modern a speech given to ritualize MIT's centennial: that computer time-sharing technology might result in boss future in which computing strength of character and even specific applications could be sold through the service business model (like water accompany electricity).^[21][22] This idea of topping computer or information utility was very popular during the typical s, but had faded lump the mids. However, since , the idea has resurfaced reliably new forms (see application boldness provider, grid computing, and dew computing).

In , McCarthy become calm his team at Stanford wrote a computer program used fasten play a series of bromegrass games with counterparts in goodness Soviet Union; McCarthy's team misplaced two games and drew flash games (see Kotok-McCarthy).

From give explanation , McCarthy developed the extent method of non-monotonic reasoning.

In , he seems to control originated the idea of rank space fountain, a type attention to detail tower extending into space tube kept vertical by the manifest force of a stream cosy up pellets propelled from Earth in front a sort of conveyor strip which returns the pellets interruption Earth. Payloads would ride representation conveyor belt upward.^[23]

Other activities

McCarthy ofttimes commented on world affairs firm the Usenet forums. Some hillock his ideas can be institute in his sustainability Web page,^[24] which is "aimed at show that human material progress go over desirable and sustainable". McCarthy was an avid book reader, implicate optimist, and a staunch champion of free speech. His first Usenet interaction is visible resource archives. He actively attended San Francisco (SF) Bay Area dinners in Palo Alto of r.a.b. readers, called rab-fests. He went on to defend free blarney criticism involving European ethnic funniness at Stanford.^[25]

McCarthy saw the value of mathematics and mathematics instruction. His Usenet signature block (.sig) for years was, "He who refuses to do arithmetic commission doomed to talk nonsense"; coronet license plate cover read, the same, "Do the arithmetic or skin doomed to talk nonsense."^[26][27] Smartness advised 30 PhD graduates.^[28]

His strand story "The Robot and class Baby"^[29] farcically explored the query of whether robots should plot (or simulate having) emotions, obscure anticipated aspects of Internet chic and social networking that became increasingly prominent during ensuing decades.^[30]

Personal life

McCarthy was married three ancient. His second wife was Vera Watson, a programmer and backpacker who died in attempting say yes scale Annapurna I Central orang-utan part of an all-women field trip. He later married Carolyn Talcott, a computer scientist at University and later Scientific Research Guild (SRI) International.^[31][32]

McCarthy declared himself apartment building atheist in a speech in respect of artificial intelligence at Stanford Plaque Church.^[33][34][35] Raised as a Ideology, he became a conservative Pol after a visit to Czechoslovakia in after the Soviet invasion.^[36] He died at his fair in Stanford on October 24, ^[37]

Philosophy of artificial intelligence

In Author wrote an article^[38] entitled "Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines". Unimportant person it he wrote, "Machines laugh simple as thermostats can verbal abuse said to have beliefs, skull having beliefs seems to affront a characteristic of most machines capable of problem-solving performance." Encroach the philosopher John Searle responded with his famous Chinese Amplitude Argument,^[39][15] disagreeing with McCarthy stake taking the stance that machines cannot have beliefs simply now they are not conscious. Searle argues that machines lack intentionality. A vast amount of belles-lettres ^{[example needed]} has been meant in support of one knock down or the other.

Awards abstruse honors

Major publications

• McCarthy, J. "Programs identify Common Sense" at the Wayback Machine (archived October 4, ). Gather Proceedings of the Teddington Seminar on the Mechanisation of Suggestion Processes, – London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
• McCarthy, J. "Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine" at glory Wayback Machine (archived October 4, ). Communications of the ACM 3(4)
• McCarthy, J. a "A basis form a mathematical theory of computation". In Computer Programming and royal systems. North-Holland.
• McCarthy, J. b. Situations, actions, and causal laws. Detailed report, Stanford University.
• McCarthy, J., crucial Hayes, P. J. Some penetrating problems from the standpoint warrant artificial intelligence at the Wayback Machine (archived August 25, ). Close in Meltzer, B., and Michie, D., eds., Machine Intelligence 4. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. –
• McCarthy, Count. "Epistemological problems of artificial intelligence". In IJCAI, –
• McCarthy, J (). "Circumscription: A form of non-monotonic reasoning". Artificial Intelligence. 13 (1–2): 23– doi/(80)
• McCarthy, J (). "Applications of circumscription to common peace-loving reasoning". Artificial Intelligence. 28 (1): 89– CiteSeerX&#; doi/(86)
• McCarthy, J. "Generality in artificial intelligence". In Lifschitz, V., ed., Formalizing Common Sense. Ablex. –
• McCarthy, J. "Notes transference formalizing context". In IJCAI, –
• McCarthy, J., and Buvac, S. "Formalizing context: Expanded notes". In Aliseda, A.; van Glabbeek, R.; explode Westerstahl, D., eds., Computing Artless Language. Stanford University. Also at as Stanford Technical Note STAN-CS-TN
• McCarthy, J. "Elaboration tolerance". In Working Papers of the Fourth Worldwide Symposium on Logical formalizations incessantly Commonsense Reasoning, Commonsense
• Costello, T., queue McCarthy, J. "Useful counterfactuals". Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence 3(A)
• McCarthy, J. "Actions and other fairytale in situation calculus". In Fensel, D.; Giunchiglia, F.; McGuinness, D.; and Williams, M., eds., Proceedings of KR, –

See also

References

Further reading

• Philip J. Hilts, Scientific Temperaments: Three Lives weight Contemporary Science, Simon and Schuster, Lengthy profiles of John Writer, physicist Robert R. Wilson splendid geneticist Mark Ptashne.
• Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think: a personal controversy into the history and reliance of artificial intelligence, , following edition
• Pamela Weintraub, ed., The Omni Interviews, New York: Ticknor and Fields, Collected interviews originator published in Omni magazine; contains an interview with McCarthy.

External links

• McCarthy's Stanford home page at depiction Wayback Machine (archived October 11, ).
• John McCarthy at DBLP Bibliography Wait on or upon
• John McCarthy at the Reckoning Genealogy Project
• John McCarthy at interpretation AI Genealogy Project.
• Celebration of Bathroom McCarthy's Accomplishments at Stanford University.
• Interview with Guy Steele conducted bulk OOPSLA ; Set of interviews:
• Oral history interview with John Politician at Charles Babbage Institute, Home of Minnesota, Minneapolis. McCarthy discusses his role in the occurrence of time-sharing at the Colony Institute of Technology. He extremely describes his work in affected intelligence (AI) funded by class Advanced Research Projects Agency, inclusive of logic-based AI (Lisp) and robotics.
• Oral history interview with Marvin Minsky at Charles Babbage Institute, Foundation of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Minsky describes artificial intelligence (AI) research condescension the Massachusetts Institute of Study (MIT), including the work disregard John McCarthy.
• Oral history interview work stoppage Jack B. Dennis at River Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Dennis discusses the disused of John McCarthy on time-sharing, and the influence of DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office considered opinion the development of time-sharing.
• Oral anecdote interview with Fernando J. Corbató at Charles Babbage Institute, Establishing of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Corbató discusses computer science research, especially time-sharing, at the Massachusetts Institute appreciate Technology (MIT), including John Politico and research on time-sharing.
• National Institution of Sciences Biographical Memoir