John McCarthy (computer scientist)
Encyclopedia
John McCarthy
was an American computer scientist
Computer scientist
A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....

 and cognitive scientist. He coined the term "artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

" (AI), invented the Lisp programming language and was highly influential in the early development of AI.

McCarthy also influenced other areas of computing such as time sharing systems. He received the Turing Award
Turing Award
The Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...

 for his major contributions to the field of AI, and many other accolades and honors, including the United States National Medal of Science
National Medal of Science
The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social sciences, biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and...

.

Personal life and education

John McCarthy was born in Boston, Massachusetts on September 4, 1927 to an Irish immigrant father and a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant mother, John Patrick and Ida Glatt McCarthy. The family was forced to move frequently during the Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

, until McCarthy's father found work as an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...

.

McCarthy was exceptionally bright, and graduated from Belmont High School two years early. He 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
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...

 (Caltech). As a result, when McCarthy was accepted into Caltech in 1944, he was able to skip the first two years of mathematics.

McCarthy was reportedly expelled from Caltech for failure to attend physical education courses; he then served in the US Army and was readmitted, receiving a B.S. in Mathematics in 1948. It was at Caltech that he attended a lecture by John Von Neumann
John von Neumann
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis,...

 that inspired his future endeavors. McCarthy initially continued his studies at Caltech. He received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 in 1951 under Solomon Lefschetz
Solomon Lefschetz
Solomon Lefschetz was an American mathematician who did fundamental work on algebraic topology, its applications to algebraic geometry, and the theory of non-linear ordinary differential equations.-Life:...

.

McCarthy was married three times. His second wife was Vera Watson, a programmer and mountaineer who died in 1978 attempting to scale Annapurna I. He later married Carolyn Talcott, a computer scientist at Stanford and later SRI International
SRI International
SRI International , founded as Stanford Research Institute, is one of the world's largest contract research institutes. Based in Menlo Park, California, the trustees of Stanford University established it in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region. It was later...

.

Career in computer science

After short-term appointments at Princeton, Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, Dartmouth
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...

, and MIT, he became a full professor
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 at Stanford in 1962, where he remained until his retirement at the end of 2000. By the end of his early days at MIT he was already affectionately referred to as "Uncle John".

McCarthy championed mathematical logic
Mathematical logic
Mathematical logic is a subfield of mathematics with close connections to foundations of mathematics, theoretical computer science and philosophical logic. The field includes both the mathematical study of logic and the applications of formal logic to other areas of mathematics...

 for artificial intelligence. In 1956, he organized the first international conference to focus on artificial intelligence. One of the attendees was Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence , co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.-Biography:...

, who became, later, one of the leading theorists in the field, and joined McCarthy at MIT in 1959. In the fall of 1956, McCarthy won an MIT research fellowship. In 1958, he proposed the advice taker
Advice taker
The advice taker was a hypothetical computer program, proposed by John McCarthy in his 1958 paper "Programs with Common Sense" . It was probably the first proposal to use logic to represent information in a computer and not just as the subject matter of another program. It may also have been the...

, which inspired later work on question-answering and logic programming
Logic programming
Logic programming is, in its broadest sense, the use of mathematical logic for computer programming. In this view of logic programming, which can be traced at least as far back as John McCarthy's [1958] advice-taker proposal, logic is used as a purely declarative representation language, and a...

. Around 1959, he invented garbage collection
Garbage collection (computer science)
In computer science, garbage collection is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector, or just collector, attempts to reclaim garbage, or memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use by the program...

 to solve problems in Lisp. Based on the lambda calculus
Lambda calculus
In mathematical logic and computer science, lambda calculus, also written as λ-calculus, is a formal system for function definition, function application and recursion. The portion of lambda calculus relevant to computation is now called the untyped lambda calculus...

, Lisp rapidly became the programming language of choice for AI applications after its publication in 1960. He helped to motivate the creation of Project MAC at MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

, but left MIT for Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 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
Time-sharing
Time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking. Its introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major technological shift in the history of computing.By allowing a large...

 technology might lead to a future in which computing power and even specific applications could be sold through the utility
Utility
In economics, utility is a measure of customer satisfaction, referring to the total satisfaction received by a consumer from consuming a good or service....

 business model (like water
Water
Water is a chemical substance with the chemical formula H2O. A water molecule contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms connected by covalent bonds. Water is a liquid at ambient conditions, but it often co-exists on Earth with its solid state, ice, and gaseous state . Water also exists in a...

 or electricity
Electricity
Electricity is a general term encompassing a variety of phenomena resulting from the presence and flow of electric charge. These include many easily recognizable phenomena, such as lightning, static electricity, and the flow of electrical current in an electrical wire...

). This idea of a computer or information utility was very popular in the late 1960s, but faded by the mid-1990s. However, since 2000, the idea has resurfaced in new forms (see application service provider
Application service provider
An application service provider is a business that provides computer-based services to customers over a network. Software offered using an ASP model is also sometimes called On-demand software or software as a service ....

, grid computing
Grid computing
Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files...

, and cloud computing
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

.)

In 1966, McCarthy and his team at Stanford wrote a computer program used to play a series of chess games with counterparts in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

; McCarthy's team lost two games and drew
Draw (chess)
In chess, a draw is when a game ends in a tie. It is one of the possible outcomes of a game, along with a win for White and a win for Black . Usually, in tournaments a draw is worth a half point to each player, while a win is worth one point to the victor and none to the loser.For the most part,...

 two games, see Kotok-McCarthy
Kotok-McCarthy
Kotok-McCarthy also known as was the first computer program to play chess convincingly. It is also remembered because it played in and lost the first chess match between two computer programs.-Development:...

.

From 1978 to 1986, McCarthy developed the circumscription method of non-monotonic reasoning.

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."

In 1982 he appears to have originated the idea of the space fountain
Space fountain
A space fountain is a proposed form of space elevator that does not require the structure to be in geostationary orbit, and does not rely on tensile strength for support. In contrast to the original space elevator design , a space fountain is a tremendously tall tower extending up from the ground...

, a form of "space elevator", which was further examined by Roderick Hyde.

McCarthy often commented on world affairs on the Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...

 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". McCarthy was a serious book reader, an optimist, and a staunch supporter of free speech. His best Usenet interaction is visible in rec.arts.books archives. And John actively attended SF Bay Area dinners in Palo Alto of r.a.b. readers called rab-fests. John went on to defend free speech criticism involving European ethnic jokes at Stanford.

McCarthy saw the importance of math and math education which included a license plate guard on his BMW car noting: those who don't speak math are doomed to speak nonsense (paraphrased).

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.

Awards and honors

  • Turing Award
    Turing Award
    The Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...

     from the Association for Computing Machinery
    Association for Computing Machinery
    The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

     (1971).
  • Kyoto Prize
    Kyoto Prize
    The has been awarded annually since 1985 by the Inamori Foundation, founded by Kazuo Inamori. The prize is a Japanese award similar in intent to the Nobel Prize, as it recognizes outstanding works in the fields of philosophy, arts, science and technology...

     (1988).
  • National Medal of Science
    National Medal of Science
    The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social sciences, biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and...

     (USA) in Mathematical, Statistical, and Computational Sciences (1991).
  • Inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum
    Computer History Museum
    The Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, USA. The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on our lives.-History:The museum's origins...

     (1999)
  • Benjamin Franklin Medal
    Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute)
    The Benjamin Franklin Medal is a science and engineering award presented by the Franklin Institute, of Philadelphia, PA, USA.-Laureates:*1998 - Emmanuel Desurvire *1998 - Robert B. Laughlin *1998 - David N. Payne...

     in Computer and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute
    Franklin Institute
    The Franklin Institute is a museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and one of the oldest centers of science education and development in the United States, dating to 1824. The Institute also houses the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial.-History:On February 5, 1824, Samuel Vaughn Merrick and...

     (2003).
  • Inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems
    IEEE Intelligent Systems
    IEEE Intelligent Systems, a bimonthly publication of the IEEE Computer Society. It is an AAAI-sponsored journal. Cosponsors are the British Computer Society and the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence....

    ' AI's Hall of Fame (2011), for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems".

Major publications

  • McCarthy, J. 1959. Programs with Common Sense. In Proceedings of the Teddington 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.

See also

  • Cornucopian
    Cornucopian
    A cornucopian is a futurist who believes that continued progress and provision of material items for mankind can be met by similarly continued advances in technology...

  • Frame problem
    Frame problem
    In artificial intelligence, the frame problem was initially formulated as the problem of expressing a dynamical domain in logic without explicitly specifying which conditions are not affected by an action. John McCarthy and Patrick J. Hayes defined this problem in their 1969 article, Some...

  • Kotok-McCarthy
    Kotok-McCarthy
    Kotok-McCarthy also known as was the first computer program to play chess convincingly. It is also remembered because it played in and lost the first chess match between two computer programs.-Development:...

  • McCarthy 91 function
    McCarthy 91 function
    The McCarthy 91 function is a recursive function, defined by computer scientist John McCarthy as a test case for formal verification within computer science.The McCarthy 91 function is defined as...


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
    Pamela McCorduck
    Pamela McCorduck is the author of a number of books concerning the history and philosophical significance of artificial intelligence, the future of engineering and the role of women and technology. She is also the author of three novels. She is a contributor to Omni, New York Times, Daedalus, the...

    , 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.

External links

  • McCarthy's Stanford home page.
  • Interview with Guy Steele conducted at OOPSLA 2008; Set of interviews:
  • Oral history interview with John McCarthy at Charles Babbage Institute
    Charles Babbage Institute
    The Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....

    , 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.
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