Both parents were active members of theCommunist Party during the 1930s, and they encouraged learning and critical thinking. Before he attended high school, McCarthy became interested in science by reading a translation of100,000 Whys, a Russian popular science book for children.[7] He was fluent in theRussian language and made friends with Russian scientists during multiple trips to theSoviet Union, but distanced himself after making visits to theSoviet Bloc, which led to him becoming aconservativeRepublican.[8]
McCarthy graduated fromBelmont High School two years early[9] and was accepted into Caltech in 1944.
He showed an early aptitude formathematics; during his teens, he taught himself college math by studying the textbooks used at the nearbyCalifornia Institute of Technology (Caltech). As a result, he was able to skip the first two years of math at Caltech.[10] He was suspended from Caltech for failure to attendphysical education courses.[11] He then served in theUS Army and was readmitted, receiving a Bachelor of Science (BS) inmathematics in 1948.[12]
It was at Caltech that he attended a lecture byJohn von Neumann that inspired his future endeavors.
After short-term appointments at Princeton andStanford University, McCarthy became an assistant professor atDartmouth in 1955.
A year later, he moved toMIT as a researchfellow in the autumn of 1956. By the end of his years at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) he was already affectionately referred to as "Uncle John" by his students.[14]
In 1962, he became a fullprofessor at Stanford, where he remained until his retirement in 2000.
In the late 1950s, McCarthy discovered thatprimitive recursive functions could be extended to compute with symbolic expressions, producing theLisp programming language.[16] That functional programming seminal paper also introduced the lambda notation borrowed from the syntax oflambda calculus in which later dialects likeScheme based its semantics. Lisp soon became the programming language of choice for AI applications after its publication in 1960.
During his time atMIT, he helped motivate the creation ofProject MAC, and while at Stanford University, he helped establish theStanford AI Laboratory, for many years a friendly rival to Project MAC.
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.[9]
— Elaine Woo
In 1961, he was perhaps the first to suggest publicly the idea ofutility computing, in a speech given to celebrate MIT's centennial: that computertime-sharing technology might result in a future in which computing power and even specific applications could be sold through theutility business model (likewater orelectricity).[21][22] This idea of a computer or information utility was very popular during the late 1960s, but had faded by the mid-1990s. However, since 2000, the idea has resurfaced in new forms (seeapplication service provider,grid computing, andcloud computing).
In 1966, McCarthy and his team at Stanford wrote a computer program used to play a series ofchess games with counterparts in theSoviet Union; McCarthy's team lost two games anddrew two games (seeKotok-McCarthy).
In 1982, he seems to have originated the idea of thespace fountain, a type of tower extending into space and kept vertical by the outward force of a stream of pellets propelled from Earth along a sort of conveyor belt which returns the pellets to Earth. Payloads would ride the conveyor belt upward.[23]
McCarthy often commented on world affairs on theUsenet forums. Some of his ideas can be found in his sustainability Web page,[24] which is "aimed at showing that human material progress is desirable and sustainable". McCarthy was an avid book reader, an optimist, and a staunch supporter of free speech. His best Usenet interaction is visible in rec.arts.books archives. He actively attended San Francisco (SF) Bay Area dinners inPalo Alto of r.a.b. readers, called rab-fests. He went on to defend free speech criticism involving European ethnic jokes at Stanford.[25]
McCarthy saw the importance of mathematics and mathematics education. HisUsenet signature block (.sig) for years was, "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense"; his license plate cover read, similarly, "Do the arithmetic or be doomed to talk nonsense."[26][27] He advised 30 PhD graduates.[28]
His 2001 short story "The Robot and the Baby"[29] farcically explored the question of whether robots should have (or simulate having) emotions, and anticipated aspects of Internet culture andsocial networking that became increasingly prominent during ensuing decades.[30]
In 1979 McCarthy wrote an article[38] entitled "Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines". In it he wrote, "Machines as simple asthermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem-solving performance." In 1980 the philosopherJohn Searle responded with his famousChinese Room Argument,[39][15] disagreeing with McCarthy and taking the stance that machines cannot have beliefs simply because they are not conscious. Searle argues that machines lackintentionality. A vast amount of literature[example needed] has been written in support of one side or the other.
Inducted as a Fellow of theComputer History Museum "for his co-founding of the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and timesharing systems, and for major contributions to mathematics and computer science" (1999)[41]
McCarthy, J. 1959."Programs with Common Sense" at theWayback Machine (archived October 4, 2013). InProceedings of the Teddington Conference on the Mechanisation of Thought Processes, 756–91. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
McCarthy, J. 1990. "Generality in artificial intelligence". In Lifschitz, V., ed.,Formalizing Common Sense. Ablex. 226–236.
McCarthy, J. 1993. "Notes on formalizing context". InIJCAI, 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". InWorking Papers of the Fourth International Symposium on Logical formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, Commonsense-1998.
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.
^The lecture, entitled "Time Sharing Computer Systems," is pp. 220-248 inManagement and the Computer of the Future (ed Martin Greenberger), published 1962, later reprinted asComputers and the world of the future (1965).
^McCarthy, John (June 28, 2001)."The Robot and the Baby". formal.stanford.edu. Archived fromthe original on October 4, 2013. RetrievedNovember 24, 2013.
Philip J. Hilts,Scientific Temperaments: Three Lives in Contemporary Science, Simon and Schuster, 1982. Lengthy profiles of John McCarthy, physicist Robert R. Wilson and geneticist Mark Ptashne.
Pamela McCorduck,Machines Who Think: a personal inquiry into the history and prospects of artificial intelligence, 1979, second edition 2004.
Pamela Weintraub, ed.,The Omni Interviews, New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1984. Collected interviews originally published inOmni magazine; contains an interview with McCarthy.
Oral history interview with John McCarthy atCharles 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.
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