John McCarthy
In plain wordsThe American computer scientist who coined the term 'artificial intelligence', invented the Lisp programming language and championed formal logic as the route to machine common sense.
American computer scientist who coined the term artificial intelligenceartificial intelligence, n.: Computer systems that do things we would normally credit to a thinking mind, such as holding a conversation, reading an X-ray or planning a route, and the field of research that builds them. in the 1955 proposal, written with Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky, prop. n.: An American AI pioneer who helped launch the field and MIT's AI laboratory, co-wrote a famous critique of early neural networks, and pictured the mind as a society of many simple parts., Nathaniel Rochester and Claude ShannonClaude Shannon, prop. n.: An American engineer and mathematician who invented information theory, the mathematics of bits and communication, and wrote one of the first plans for a chess-playing computer., for the 1956 Dartmouth workshopDartmouth workshop, prop. n.: A summer meeting of scientists at Dartmouth College in 1956, planned in a 1955 funding proposal that first used the phrase 'artificial intelligence'. Most histories treat it as the moment AI became a research field of its own.. In 1958 he created LispLisp, prop. n.: A programming language invented in 1958 for AI research, in which programs and data are written the same way, as nested lists in parentheses. It was the main language of AI for decades., which introduced garbage collection and was the main language of AI research for three decades. He co-founded the MIT AI Project with Minsky, then moved to Stanford in 1962 and founded what became the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). His paper 'Programs with Common Sense' (1958) proposed an Advice Taker that reasons in formal logic, launching the logicist tradition in knowledge representationknowledge representation, n.: The study of how to record knowledge about objects, categories, rules and events in a precise format, so that a program can reason with it and reach conclusions nobody typed in.; he developed the situation calculus, identified the frame problemframe problem, n.: The difficulty of getting an AI to work out what does and does not change when something happens, without spelling out every one of the countless things that stay the same. with Patrick Hayes (1969), and proposed circumscription for non-monotonic reasoningnon-monotonic reasoning, n.: Reasoning in which new information can overturn earlier conclusions — you assume a bird can fly until you learn it is a penguin — as people do constantly but classical logic does not allow. (1980). He was also an early advocate of computer time-sharing. Turing AwardTuring Award, prop. n.: Nicknamed the 'Nobel Prize of computing', the top honor in computer science, awarded each year since 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery. Several AI pioneers have received it. 1971; Kyoto Prize 1988; US National Medal of Science 1990.
Related
- artificial intelligenceartificial intelligence, n.: Computer systems that do things we would normally credit to a thinking mind, such as holding a conversation, reading an X-ray or planning a route, and the field of research that builds them.
- Dartmouth workshopDartmouth workshop, prop. n.: A summer meeting of scientists at Dartmouth College in 1956, planned in a 1955 funding proposal that first used the phrase 'artificial intelligence'. Most histories treat it as the moment AI became a research field of its own.
- LispLisp, prop. n.: A programming language invented in 1958 for AI research, in which programs and data are written the same way, as nested lists in parentheses. It was the main language of AI for decades.
- frame problemframe problem, n.: The difficulty of getting an AI to work out what does and does not change when something happens, without spelling out every one of the countless things that stay the same.
- commonsense reasoningcommonsense reasoning, n.: The everyday background knowledge and reasoning people take for granted — dropped glasses break, hungry people eat, nobody is in two places at once — which machines long struggled to match.
- symbolic AIsymbolic AI, n.: An approach to AI that writes knowledge down as human-readable symbols and rules, such as 'every bird has wings', and reasons by manipulating them step by step instead of learning patterns from data.
- Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky, prop. n.: An American AI pioneer who helped launch the field and MIT's AI laboratory, co-wrote a famous critique of early neural networks, and pictured the mind as a society of many simple parts.
Sources
- McCarthy, J., Minsky, M. L., Rochester, N. & Shannon, C. E. (1955). A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.
- McCarthy, J. (1960). Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I. Communications of the ACM 3(4): 184–195.
- McCarthy, J. & Hayes, P. J. (1969). Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence. Machine Intelligence 4: 463–502.
Mentioned in
Claude ShannonClaude Shannon, prop. n.: An American engineer and mathematician who invented information theory, the mathematics of bits and communication, and wrote one of the first plans for a chess-playing computer., Dartmouth workshopDartmouth workshop, prop. n.: A summer meeting of scientists at Dartmouth College in 1956, planned in a 1955 funding proposal that first used the phrase 'artificial intelligence'. Most histories treat it as the moment AI became a research field of its own., human-level AIhuman-level AI, n.: AI that can match an ordinary adult across the whole range of thinking tasks, such as talking, learning, reasoning and planning. An older, more intuitive name for the goal now usually called general AI., LispLisp, prop. n.: A programming language invented in 1958 for AI research, in which programs and data are written the same way, as nested lists in parentheses. It was the main language of AI for decades., Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky, prop. n.: An American AI pioneer who helped launch the field and MIT's AI laboratory, co-wrote a famous critique of early neural networks, and pictured the mind as a society of many simple parts., Turing AwardTuring Award, prop. n.: Nicknamed the 'Nobel Prize of computing', the top honor in computer science, awarded each year since 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery. Several AI pioneers have received it., J. C. R. LickliderJ. C. R. Licklider, prop. n.: An American psychologist who envisioned people and computers working in close partnership, and whose US government funding built early AI research and the precursor of the internet., Lighthill reportLighthill report, prop. n.: A 1973 review written for a British government research council that judged AI research to have fallen far short of its promises. It led to deep cuts in AI funding in the United Kingdom., MIT AI LabMIT AI Lab, prop. n.: The artificial intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded in 1959 and one of the birthplaces of AI and hacker culture; it is now part of MIT's computer science lab, CSAIL., proper scoring ruleproper scoring rule, n.: A way of grading probability forecasts that gives the best expected score only to a forecaster who reports what they really believe, so there is nothing to gain by exaggerating or hedging., Raj ReddyRaj Reddy, prop. n.: An Indian-American computer scientist who pioneered computer speech recognition and large AI systems at Carnegie Mellon University, and shared the 1994 Turing Award.