On comp.ai.philosophy, IIRC, there used to be a Harvard mathematics grad student (Russian, I forget his name) who used to have rip roaring debates with McCarthy. They used to be a fun read, especially since (by my reading) the guy used to run circled around McCarthy. McCarthy made great contributions to Computer Science, but I am glad that his (and Minsky’s) brand of AI, as well as Lisp, failed by and large (though these days there is a significant renewal of functional languages). I know it’s a stretch, but I think there is an interesting contrast that can be drawn between the work of the two greats who died in the last few days: Ritchie and McCarthy. C and Lisp. Unix/IP (and the underlying methodology) and strong AI, US and Japan. I am not the person for it (for one thing I am clearly biased :-)).
—ravi
On Oct 26, 2011, at 11:36 AM, Jim Farmelant wrote:
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/science/26mccarthy.html?_r=1&hpw
>
> October 25, 2011
> John McCarthy, 84, Dies; Computer Design Pioneer
> By JOHN MARKOFF
> John McCarthy, a computer scientist who helped design the foundation of
> today’s Internet-based computing and who is widely credited with coining
> the term for a frontier of research he helped pioneer, Artificial
> Intelligence, or A.I., died on Monday at his home in Stanford, Calif. He
> was 84.
>
> The cause was complications of heart disease, his daughter Sarah McCarthy
> said.
>
> Dr. McCarthy’s career followed the arc of modern computing. Trained as a
> mathematician, he was responsible for seminal advances in the field and
> was often called the father of computer time-sharing, a major development
> of the 1960s that enabled many people and organizations to draw
> simultaneously from a single computer source, like a mainframe, without
> having to own one.
>
> By lowering costs, it allowed more people to use computers and laid the
> groundwork for the interactive computing of today.
>
> Though he did not foresee the rise of the personal computer, Dr. McCarthy
> was prophetic in describing the implications of other technological
> advances decades before they gained currency.
>
> “In the early 1970s, he presented a paper in France on buying and selling
> by computer, what is now called electronic commerce,” said Whitfield
> Diffie, an Internet security expert who worked as a researcher for Dr.
> McCarthy at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
>
> And in the study of artificial intelligence, “no one is more influential
> than John,” Mr. Diffie said.
>
> While teaching mathematics at Dartmouth in 1956, Dr. McCarthy was the
> principal organizer of the first Dartmouth Conference on Artificial
> Intelligence.
>
> The idea of simulating human intelligence had been discussed for decades,
> but the term “artificial intelligence” — originally used to help raise
> funds to support the conference — stuck.
>
> In 1958, Dr. McCarthy moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
> where, with Marvin Minsky, he founded the Artificial Intelligence
> Laboratory. It was at M.I.T. that he began working on what he called List
> Processing Language, or Lisp, a computer language that became the
> standard tool for artificial intelligence research and design.
>
> Around the same time he came up with a technique called garbage
> collection, in which pieces of computer code that are not needed by a
> running computation are automatically removed from the computer’s random
> access memory.
>
> He developed the technique in 1959 and added it to Lisp. That technique
> is now routinely used in Java and other programming languages.
>
> His M.I.T. work also led to fundamental advances in software and
> operating systems. In one, he was instrumental in developing the first
> time-sharing system for mainframe computers.
>
> The power of that invention would come to shape Dr. McCarthy’s worldview
> to such an extent that when the first personal computers emerged with
> local computing and storage in the 1970s, he belittled them as toys.
>
> Rather, he predicted, wrongly, that in the future everyone would have a
> relatively simple and inexpensive computer terminal in the home linked to
> a shared, centralized mainframe and use it as an electronic portal to the
> worlds of commerce and news and entertainment media.
>
> Dr. McCarthy, who taught briefly at Stanford in the early 1950s, returned
> there in 1962 and in 1964 became the founding director of the Stanford
> Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or SAIL. Its optimistic, space-age
> goal, with financial backing from the Pentagon, was to create a working
> artificial intelligence system within a decade.
>
> Years later he developed a healthy respect for the challenge, saying that
> creating a “thinking machine” would require “1.8 Einsteins and one-tenth
> the resources of the Manhattan Project.”
>
> Artificial intelligence is still thought to be far in the future, though
> tremendous progress has been made in systems that mimic many human
> skills, including vision, listening, reasoning and, in robotics, the
> movements of limbs. From the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s, the Stanford lab
> played a vital role in creating some of these technologies, including
> robotics and machine-vision natural language.
>
> In 1972, the laboratory drew national attention when Stewart Brand, the
> founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, wrote about it in Rolling Stone
> magazine under the headline “SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death
> Among the Computer Bums.” The article evoked the esprit de corps of a
> group of researchers who had been freed to create their own virtual
> worlds, foreshadowing the emergence of cyberspace. “Ready or not,
> computers are coming to the people,” Mr. Brand wrote.
>
> Dr. McCarthy had begun inviting the Homebrew Computer Club, a Silicon
> Valley hobbyist group, to meet at the Stanford lab. Among its growing
> membership were Steven P. Jobs and Steven Wozniak, who would go on to
> found Apple. Mr. Wozniak designed his first personal computer prototype,
> the Apple 1, to share with his Homebrew friends.
>
> But Dr. McCarthy still cast a jaundiced eye on personal computing. In the
> second Homebrew newsletter, he suggested the formation of a “Bay Area
> Home Terminal Club,” to provide computer access on a shared Digital
> Equipment computer. He thought a user fee of $75 a month would be
> reasonable.
>
> Though Dr. McCarthy would initially miss the significance of the PC, his
> early thinking on electronic commerce would influence Mr. Diffie at the
> Stanford lab. Drawing on those ideas, Mr. Diffie began thinking about
> what would replace the paper personal check in an all-electronic world.
>
> He and two other researchers went on to develop the basic idea of public
> key cryptography, which is now the basis of all modern electronic banking
> and commerce, providing secure interaction between a consumer and a
> business.
>
> A chess enthusiast, Dr. McCarthy had begun working on chess-playing
> computer programs in the 1950s at Dartmouth. Shortly after joining the
> Stanford lab, he engaged a group of Soviet computer scientists in an
> intercontinental chess match after he discovered they had a chess-playing
> computer. Played by telegraph, the match consisted of four games and
> lasted almost a year. The Soviet scientists won.
>
> John McCarthy was born on Sept. 4, 1927, into a politically engaged
> family in Boston. His father, John Patrick McCarthy, was an Irish
> immigrant and a labor organizer.
>
> His mother, the former Ida Glatt, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, was
> active in the suffrage movement. Both parents were members of the
> Communist Party. The family later moved to Los Angeles in part because of
> John’s respiratory problems.
>
> He entered the California Institute of Technology in 1944 and went on to
> graduate studies at Princeton, where he was a colleague of John Forbes
> Nash Jr., the Nobel Prize-winning economist and subject of Sylvia Nasar’s
> book “A Beautiful Mind,” which was adapted into a movie.
>
> At Princeton, in 1949, he briefly joined the local Communist Party cell,
> which had two other members: a cleaning woman and a gardener, he told an
> interviewer. But he quit the party shortly afterward.
>
> In the ’60s, as the Vietnam War escalated, his politics took a
> conservative turn as he grew disenchanted with leftist politics.
>
> In 1971 Dr. McCarthy received the Turing Award, the most prestigious
> given by the Association of Computing Machinery, for his work in
> artificial intelligence. He was awarded the Kyoto Prize in 1988, the
> National Medal of Science in 1991 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in
> 2003.
>
> Dr. McCarthy was married three times. His second wife, Vera Watson, a
> member of the American Women’s Himalayan Expedition, died in a climbing
> accident on Annapurna in 1978.
>
> Besides his daughter Sarah, of Nevada City, Calif., he is survived by his
> wife, Carolyn Talcott, of Stanford; another daughter, Susan McCarthy, of
> San Francisco; and a son, Timothy, of Stanford.
>
> He remained an independent thinker throughout his life. Some years ago,
> one of his daughters presented him with a license plate bearing one of
> his favorite aphorisms: “Do the arithmetic or be doomed to talk
> nonsense.”
>
>
>
> Jim Farmelant
> http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
> www.foxymath.com
> Learn or Review Basic Math
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