Textbook of AI

1927–2011, Computer scientist; coined "Artificial Intelligence"

Also known as: J. McCarthy

John McCarthy named the field of artificial intelligence and shaped much of its first half-century. While at Dartmouth College in 1955, he co-authored, with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon, A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, the document that coined the term artificial intelligence and convened the 1956 workshop generally regarded as the founding event of the field.

In 1958 McCarthy designed LISP, the second-oldest high-level programming language still in use. LISP was created to implement symbolic computation for AI research and introduced or popularised garbage collection, conditional expressions, recursion as a primary control structure, the read–eval–print loop, and the homoiconic representation of programs as data. It remained the dominant AI programming language until the 1990s and continues to influence modern languages including Scheme, Clojure, Racket and even features of JavaScript and Python.

He founded the Stanford AI Laboratory (SAIL) in 1963 after an earlier role at MIT, where he had been instrumental in establishing what became the MIT AI Lab. His paper Programs with Common Sense (1959) introduced the Advice Taker, a thought experiment for a system that could deduce its own actions from declarative knowledge, the prototype of all later knowledge-based systems, and his work on the situation calculus with Patrick Hayes (1969) gave the field a logic-based framework for representing change, action and time.

McCarthy's other contributions span time-sharing (he proposed it as early as 1959), the formalisation of non-monotonic reasoning, and the philosophy of mind. He won the Turing Award in 1971, the Kyoto Prize in 1988 and the National Medal of Science in 1990. He spent the bulk of his career at Stanford, retiring as professor emeritus, and continued to work on common-sense reasoning and logical AI until his death in 2011.