Wednesday, October 26, 2011: John McCarthy, the man who coined the term artificial intelligence (AI), dies at the age of 84. The news was tweeted by Stanford University where McCarthy was a professor emeritus of computer science.
McCarthy, a doctorate in mathematics, never took the credit of his eminent work in the field of AI. He was widely considered one of the founding fathers of the field. McCarthy will always hold a prime spot in its history because of his development of the programming language used in AI. LISP is one the most-used high-level programming languages today. Only Fortran is older than the language and that too by just one year.
McCarthy believed that human intelligence can be understood and described succinctly enough that it can be taught to a machine.
During an interview for the book Thinking Allowed: Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr Jeffrey Mishlove, he said, “I started my work in artificial intelligence in about '56, although I became really interested in it before that, in '49, when I was a beginning graduate student in mathematics. I would say that the field has made somewhat less progress than I hoped, although I didn't have any definite opinion as to how fast it would progress. I think that it had and still has difficult conceptual problems to solve before we can get computer programs that are as intelligent as humans.”
Describing one of the hardest things about AI as giving machines a self-awareness of their part in the world, he said, “One part of the problem is to develop language in which we can express for our computer programs the facts and reasoning about the common-sense world that humans have, and that is necessary in order to behave intelligently. A machine isn't the sum of its parts. If somebody took a car apart and gave you a heap of the parts, that wouldn't be a car. They have to be connected in a specified way and interacting in a specified way, and so if you want to say that the mind is a structure composed of parts interacting in a specialised way, I would agree with that, but it isn't just a heap of them."
McCarthy received Kyoto Prize, the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for lifetime contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence in 1988.
McCarthy, a doctorate in mathematics, never took the credit of his eminent work in the field of AI. He was widely considered one of the founding fathers of the field. McCarthy will always hold a prime spot in its history because of his development of the programming language used in AI. LISP is one the most-used high-level programming languages today. Only Fortran is older than the language and that too by just one year.
McCarthy believed that human intelligence can be understood and described succinctly enough that it can be taught to a machine.
During an interview for the book Thinking Allowed: Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr Jeffrey Mishlove, he said, “I started my work in artificial intelligence in about '56, although I became really interested in it before that, in '49, when I was a beginning graduate student in mathematics. I would say that the field has made somewhat less progress than I hoped, although I didn't have any definite opinion as to how fast it would progress. I think that it had and still has difficult conceptual problems to solve before we can get computer programs that are as intelligent as humans.”
Describing one of the hardest things about AI as giving machines a self-awareness of their part in the world, he said, “One part of the problem is to develop language in which we can express for our computer programs the facts and reasoning about the common-sense world that humans have, and that is necessary in order to behave intelligently. A machine isn't the sum of its parts. If somebody took a car apart and gave you a heap of the parts, that wouldn't be a car. They have to be connected in a specified way and interacting in a specified way, and so if you want to say that the mind is a structure composed of parts interacting in a specialised way, I would agree with that, but it isn't just a heap of them."
McCarthy received Kyoto Prize, the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for lifetime contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence in 1988.
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