John McCarthy The Father of Artificial Intelligence
John McCarthy passed away on October 23, 2011. RIP. In 1956, in a conference organized with Marvin Minsky, Nat Rochester and Claude Shannon, he named his field of study as “artificial intelligence” (AI), although he has often said that if he had to baptize him again he would have preferred to call it “computational intelligence”. “The conference was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and was called Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. In 1952, McCarthy suggested to Claude Shannon to call the study of the thinking machines with the name “studies of automatons,” but when preparing in August 1955 the proposal to collect funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for the conference, he thought that a name would be better. with more marketing. The name “machine intelligence” also rung through his mind, but in the end he chose AI. In the proposal of this conference, McCarthy proposed the study of the development of a new programming language to equip the machines with intelligence (at a time when the most important high-level language was Fortran, a language not very suitable for AI ). The language that was born from the ideas of this conference was LISP (LISt Processing language).
In 1958 John McCarthy and his collaborators in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created LISP, considered by some the second high-level programming language (after FORTRAN ). LISP has changed a lot since its inception and has a large number of dialects. LISP is considered the first functional programming language and, depending on the opinions, also declarative programming .
In the year 2002, McCarthy said that “research in AI is quite fragmented. This is good because there are many possible approaches, among which two stand out. On the one hand, the biological approach, based on the idea that humans are intelligent and the AI must study humans and imitate their psychology or physiology. On the other hand, the formal approach, based on the idea that the study and formalization of the concept of common sense will allow us to make machines become intelligent. “According to McCarthy the AI is stagnant and” we still need new basic ideas; the understanding of intelligence is a very difficult scientific problem. I can not predict how long it will take for the intelligence of the machines to reach the human level, maybe 50 years, maybe 500 years, who knows. “
