Computing is losing a generation of legends. Following the recent deaths of Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie, today I learnt of the death of John McCarthy, founding father of artificial intelligence.
From Facebook, Philippe Khan (who I had the pleasure of working for a time) wrote:
RIP John Mc Carthy. I consider John’s original work as defining Artificial Intelligence. Practically we’ve all used and use LISP or derivatives such as Scheme. When John did that core work was before my time, yet I still marvel at the clarity of thought and how modern it continues to be today. Thank you John!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15444222
John McCarthy was heavily involved in the start of the AI (Artificial Intelligence) movement, and use of mathematical logic to deliver it. As one of the proponents of the 1955 Dartmouth Conference, he stated that the problem with encoding intelligence was not the capacity of the computers, but the ability to encode programs that take advantage of the capacity that they have. In addition that conference also discussed Neural Linguistic Programming and Neural Networks.
The LISP (LISt Processing) language was a natural off-shoot of this development, using evaluated parenthesized functions and arguments. LISP is inherently recursive, a problem that caused memory fragmentation, so John McCarthy also gave the world “garbage collection” routines to recycle, amalgamate and reuse blocks of memory.
In 1961, he discussed the future of time-sharing computing leading to a utility-based model for consumption of computing resources, a model that in the last few years has driven the grid and cloud computing environments.
He posted on his own web-page about global sustainability, and backs these with simple numbers gathered from quoted sources, which leads to one of his quotes, which I quite like.
Many questions can be settled by recourse to available statistics and arithmetic… The converse is that failing to look up statistics and do the arithmetic is a recipe for ignorance. source
In 2001, his short story The Robot and The Baby shows how systems which are programmed with goals may give results that are consistent with those goals, but not necessarily what you would first expect.
Again, computing has lost a visionary mind, and advocate of it’s use for the common good.
So long, John McCarthy.
