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John McCarthy

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Abstract

John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and the father of the artificial intelligence (AI) field. The term artificial intelligence was coined by McCarthy in 1955, and he was one of the founders of the field. He developed the Lisp programming language, which is one of the oldest programming languages and remains a popular language in the AI field. He served on the international committee that developed the influential Algol programming language. He did some early work on chess playing programs, and he participated in an international match against rivals in Russia conducted via telegraph. He developed the important concept of time-sharing computer systems in the late 1950s/early 1960s. He has also worked on proving that computer programs meet their specifications.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This may be hundreds or thousands of years.

  2. 2.

    Of course, the machine would somehow need to know what premises are relevant and should be selected for to apply the deductive method from the many premises that are already encoded.

  3. 3.

    Common sense includes basic facts about events, beliefs, actions, knowledge and desires. It also includes basic facts about objects and their properties.

References

  1. McCarthy J (1959) Programs with common sense. In: Proceedings of the Teddington conference on the mechanization of thought processes. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London

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  2. McCarthy J (1960) Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine. Commun ACM 3(4):184–195

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© 2013 Springer-Verlag London

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O’Regan, G. (2013). John McCarthy. In: Giants of Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5340-5_39

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5340-5_39

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-5339-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-5340-5

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