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John McCarthy was an American computer scientist known for developing time-sharing, inventing LISP, and being a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). A professor of computer science at Stanford University, McCarthy played a seminal role in defining the field of AI and the development of intelligent machines. In a 1955 proposal for a 1956 Dartmouth Conference (the first AI conference), McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence." McCarthy's research focused on developing machines that could reason like a human, solve problems, and learn to self-improve, stating,
Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.
McCarthy was born on September 4th, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Irish and Lithuanian parents. McCarthy's family moved many times, eventually settling in Los Angeles. His father worked for a clothing workers' union, and his mother was active in the women's suffrage movement. He attended Belmont High School in Los Angeles, graduating in 1943. He received a B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1948 and completed a Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton University in 1951.
While at Dartmouth, McCarthy helped organize a groundbreaking conference on artificial intelligence. In his 1955 proposal for the conference, he coined the term "artificial intelligence." This was only five years after Alan Turing had proposed the Turing Test for Intelligence. At the conference, he met Marvin Minksy, who would become a leading theorist in the field. The pair worked together at MIT, founding the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1959. McCarthy chose to return to Stanford, quickly founding Stanford's AI Laboratory (SAIL) and serving as director from 1965-1980. During this time, the lab played a significant role in creating systems to mimic human skills, such as vision, listening, reasoning, and movement.
McCarthy's key contributions to the field include commonsense reasoning, which he pioneered, and nonmonotonic reasoning. McCarthy also invented the LISP programming language in 1958, a language for symbolic computation, and developed the concept of time-sharing.
McCarthy's honors include the following:
- A. M. Turing Award from Association for Computing Machinery, 1971
- Sigma Xi National Lecturer, 1977
- Research Excellence Award, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1985
- Computer Pioneer Award IEEE Computer Society, 1985
- Elected to National Academy of Engineering, 1987
- Kyoto Prize, 1988
- Elected to National Academy of Sciences, 1989
- National Medal of Science, 1990
- Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer Cognitive Science, 2003
John McCarthy died at his home in Stanford on October 24th, 2011, at the age of eighty-four, due to complications caused by heart disease.
