PERSON
John McCarthy
Co-coiner of the term 'artificial intelligence' (1956), designer of LISP (1958), and founder of the Stanford AI Lab (1963). Also contributed to timesharing and the concept of 'garbage collection'. Recipient of the ACM Turing Award in 1971.
Profile
- Born
- 1927
- Died
- 2011
- Span
- 84 years
- Appearances
- 02
- Name
- ENJohn McCarthyJAジョン・マッカーシー
Appearances
- Summer 1956The Dartmouth Workshop — Naming Artificial IntelligenceOver roughly eight weeks in the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, ten researchers including John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester proposed and adopted the term 'artificial intelligence'. Its historical weight lies less in any specific technical result than in establishing the field's own name and the researcher network that would carry it for decades.
- 1958LISP — The Ancestor of Functional and AI LanguagesDesigned by John McCarthy at MIT for AI research—the second high-level language. S-expressions uniformly expressing code and data, recursion, list processing, garbage collection, first-class functions: many of the ideas later languages would rediscover were already present at the start. The lineage that includes Scheme, Common Lisp, Clojure, and—indirectly—Haskell and other functional languages begins here.