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On John Mccarthy's 80Th Birthday, in Honor Of On John McCarthy’s 80th Birthday, in Honor of his Contributions Patrick J. Hayes and Leora Morgenstern Abstract John McCarthy’s contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence are legendary. He invented Lisp, made substantial contributions to early work in timesharing and the theory of computation, and was one of the founders of artificial intelligence and knowl- edge representation. This article, written in honor of McCarthy’s 80th birthday, presents a brief biography, an overview of the major themes of his research, and a discussion of several of his major papers. Introduction Fifty years ago, John McCarthy embarked on a bold and unique plan to achieve human-level intelligence in computers. It was not his dream of an intelligent com- puter that was unique, or even first: Alan Turing (Tur- ing 1950) had envisioned a computer that could con- verse intelligently with humans back in 1950; by the mid 1950s, there were several researchers (including Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, Oliver Selfridge, and Marvin Min- sky) dabbling in what would be called artificial intelli- gence. What distinguished McCarthy’s plan was his emphasis on using mathematical logic both as a lan- guage for representing the knowledge that an intelligent machine should have, and as a means for reasoning with that knowledge. This emphasis on mathematical logic was to lead to the development of the logicist approach to artificial intelligence, as well as to the development of the computer language Lisp. John McCarthy’s contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence are legendary. He revolution- ized the use of computers with his innovations in time- sharing; he invented Lisp, one of the longest-lived com- puter languages in use; he made substantial contribu- tions to early work in the mathematical theory of com- putation; he was one of the founders of the field of artifi- cial intelligence; and he foresaw the need for knowledge Figure 1: John McCarthy representation before the field of AI was even properly born. John McCarthy turned 80 on September 4, 2007. This article is a celebration of that milestone. It in- Copyright c 2007, Association for the Advancement of Ar- tificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. cludes a glimpse of McCarthy’s life, an overview of the fress 1951), a conference that joined together lead- major themes of his work, and a discussion of several of ing researchers in different areas related to cognitive his major papers. The aim is to introduce a more com- science, including mathematicians Alan Turing and plete picture of McCarthy’s long-term research to the Claude Shannon, and psychologist Karl Lashley. As AI Magazine readership. We hope it will help readers he listened to the discussions comparing computers and appreciate the range and depth of innovation in Mc- the brain, McCarthy had a watershed moment. From Carthy’s research. that time on, his chief interests related to the devel- opment of machines that could think like people. In- Background deed, some of the example problems that are present in McCarthy’s papers, such as the monkeys and bananas McCarthy was born in Boston in 1927 to John Patrick problem, come from the Hixon Symposium: Karl Lash- and Ida Glatt McCarthy, immigrants from, respectively, ley described an ape pulling over a box and climbing on Ireland and Lithuania. The Depression started a few it in order to get a bunch of bananas, and McCarthy years after his birth; McCarthy’s parents lost their took that as a base level for intelligent reasoning. house, and the family — which now included a second McCarthy began to consider the possibility of con- child — became briefly peripatetic. They lived for a structing intelligent computers. This was all at a rather short while in New York and then in Cleveland before abstract level, since at that point, no computers were finally settling in Los Angeles, where the senior Mc- available to him. He conceived of two interacting fi- Carthy worked as an organizer for the Amalgamated nite automata, one representing the human brain, and Clothing Workers. one representing the environment. When he arrived Like many child prodigies, John McCarthy was partly at Princeton in 1949, he spoke to John von Neumann self-educated. Due to childhood illness, he began school about his ideas; von Neumann was interested and told a year late, but he quickly made up the time on his own, him to write them up. But McCarthy, upon further skipped several grades, and wound up graduating from reflection, was dissatisfied with his original idea. He re- high school two years early. When he was a teenager alized that he needed to somehow represent the knowl- he developed an interest in mathematics and decided he edge in the human brain, and that a pair of finite au- wanted to go to the California Institute of Technology. tomata, even if they could accurately represent the be- At fifteen, he bought the calculus textbook then used havior of a human brain interacting with the environ- in the Cal Tech freshman calculus course and taught ment, didn’t have enough structure to represent hu- it to himself in its entirety. In the hubris of youth, he man knowledge. Although he hadn’t yet named it, Mc- applied only to Cal Tech, writing a one-sentence state- Carthy had at this point already identified the need ment of purpose on his college application: “I intend for knowledge representation. Twenty years later, Mc- to be a professor of mathematics.” When he arrived Carthy was to formalize this intuition when he made at Cal Tech, he discovered that the textbook for the the distinction between a metaphysically adequate rep- course had been changed. But the self-study paid off. resentation and an epistemologically adequate represen- Before classes started, he bumped into one of the in- tation (McCarthy & Hayes 1969). (McCarthy’s ideas on structors for freshman calculus, asked him a detailed interacting automata were independently invented and question related to one of the textbook problems on developed by Larry Fogel some years later; see (Fogel which he had been working, and showed him his note- 1962).) book with worked-out problems. ”I don’t want you in my class,” that instructor said, and arranged for him to McCarthy finished his Ph.D. in two years, on a prob- be given credit for freshman calculus. The same thing lem in partial differential equations that he had discov- happened when he met the instructor for sophomore ered. He stayed on for a couple of years at Princeton as calculus. Ultimately, he was plunked down, at the age an instructor. It was during this time that he met Mar- of 16, in graduate math class. vin Minsky, who began his graduate studies at Prince- ton just as McCarthy was starting his instructorship. McCarthy and Minsky discovered a shared passion for Birth of AI research into constructing intelligent machines; the two After McCarthy received his Bachelors of Science from were to collaborate on many projects over the next Cal Tech, he began his graduate studies there. For decade. In 1952, McCarthy spent a summer working McCarthy, the intellectual ferment at the time was pal- at Bell Labs. He approached Claude Shannon with the pable. The excitement generated by the use of early idea of collecting papers on the topic of intelligent ma- computers to decode enemy messages — and thus help chines. Claude Shannon, in addition to his seminal con- win World War II — was still running high. The the- tributions in information theory, analog circuit design, oretical foundations for computing had recently been and computational linguistics, had recently published laid by Church and Turing. There was a growing inter- a groundbreaking paper on how one could program a est in the workings of the mind, in what would later be machine to play chess. Shannon agreed to collaborate called cognitive science. on such a collection, but, recalls McCarthy, didn’t want In September 1948, McCarthy went to the Hixon the title to be too provocative. As a result, they called Symposium on Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior (Jef- the planned volume Automata Studies (Shannon & Mc- Carthy 1956). As the papers began to come in, Mc- project: figuring out how to get computers to do com- Carthy (at this point an acting assistant professor at monsense reasoning. The work was radically different Stanford) was disappointed when he realized that the from that of his AI colleagues in at least two ways. papers, while all related to automata studies in some First, previous work in AI had focused on getting a way, had little to do with what he regarded as getting computer to replicate activities that are challenging machines to do intelligent reasoning. for humans, such as playing chess and proving theo- So he decided to nail the flag to the mast and be rems of mathematics. In contrast, McCarthy was con- explicit about the sort of research and the sort of pa- cerned with mundane and seemingly trivial tasks, such pers that he wanted to encourage. He therefore came as constructing a plan to get to the airport. Second, up with “artificial intelligence” — a term that would he was proposing using the tools of mathematical logic make it clear that the goal was to construct machines for proving something other than theorems in math- that acted in a truly intelligent manner. It was this ematical domains. His paper, “Programs With Com- term that he used in 1955 when he began writing — mon Sense” (McCarthy 1959) (often referred to as the with Minsky, Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester, a re- Advice-Taker paper), articulated the need for a com- searcher at IBM — the proposal to fund the first con- puter to be able to perform commonsense reasoning and ference dedicated to the topic, the famous Dartmouth the need for a computer to have a formal representation conference on artificial intelligence.
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