Abstract
In this article we summarise the contributions of John McCarthy to Computer Science. Among his contributions are: suggesting that the best method of using computers is in an interactive mode, a mode in which computers become partners of users enabling them to solve problems. This logically led to the idea of time sharing of large computers by many users and computing becoming a utility — much like a power utility. The major contributions for which he is known is coining the term Artificial Intelligence to describe computer programs which seemingly exhibit intelligence, that is, computers perform tasks which when performed by humans require them to be intelligent. He was a life-long believer in using mathematical logic to describe knowledge, including commonsense knowledge, which led to the development of the subject of knowledge representation. He invented LISP (a programming language which has lived for over fifty years) to solve problems in Artificial Intelligence. Besides his technical contributions he was a great teacher and was instrumental in creating two famous schools in Artificial Intelligence: one at MIT and the other at Stanford.
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John McCarthy, Reminiscences on the history of time sharing, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol.14, No.1, pp.19–24, 1992.
PDP-1 from Wikipedia, See also Computer History Museum PDP-1 Restoration Project for pictures of PDP-1.
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V Rajaraman is at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Several generations of scientists and engineers in India have learnt computer science using his lucidly written textbooks on programming and computer fundamentals. His current research interests are parallel computing and history of computing.
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Rajaraman, V. JohnMcCarthy — Father of artificial intelligence. Reson 19, 198–207 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-014-0027-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-014-0027-9