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Born in Boston Massachusetts
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McCarthy graduated from Belmont High School two years early.
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Wrote in statement that he "intended to be a professor of mathematics"
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Graduated from Caltech with a BS in Mathematics after being suspended for not attending his physical education courses. Served in the US Army during his suspension and was allowed readmission. -
Attended a lecture by John Von Neumann, inspiring him to think about and work with what was later named Artificial Intelligence.
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Completed doctoral dissertation "Projection Operators and partial Differential Equations" -
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Worked with Claude Shannon to edit collection of papers on Machine intelligence
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wrote proposal along with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon titled "A proposal for the Dartmouth summer research project on Artificial Intelligence" for the following summer. Beginning to serious work in this field.
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worked with Marvin Minsky to set up the Artificial Intelligence laboratory at MIT
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LiSt Processing. Artificial Intelligence needed a new computer programming language. Based on lambda calculus with symbolic expressions rather than numbers. Used tree-data structures, dynamic typing, and self-hosting compiler. Allowed for great expansion of ideas in computer science, including interpreters that are written in the same language as the program itself. Today it's used in many natural language programs and research. Second oldest surviving language after FORTRAN. -
Elaborated on his idea of artificial intelligence. He considered it "math with common sense". Named a hypothetical program "advice taker" using logic based data.
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This technique allowed pieces of computer code that are not needed by running computations, to be automatically removed from computer's random access memory. Added to LISP, and is used in many other programming languages. Helped to free memory.
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Mccarthy argued for the need for computers to perform commonsense reasoning if they are going to be considered intelligent. Controversial as issues with knowledge and reasoning have many exceptions, even in real life.
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First to propose and design time-sharing computer systems, allowing computers to switch attention back and forth between tasks. Individual users could appear to have access to a mainframe computer. Became common in the 1960's and 70's.
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McCarthy was involved in the committee that developed ALGOL 60. Used his "garbage" collection technique.
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Remained there until his retirement in 2000. Referred to as "uncle John" by his students. Made many contributions while there, and had many students that he advised go on to make other developments in the field. -
Developed timesharing system with J.C.R Licklider, Edward Fredkin, Bolt Beranek, and Newman. Helped inspire creation of project MAC.
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Included theories of conditional expressions, and uses, and methods of recursion induction for programming properties of recursively defined functions.
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Research based in machine intelligence, interactive computing and autonomous vehicles.
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Chess match between McCarthy's Kotok-McCarthy Chess Program of the United States, and the Soviet Union's Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics Kaissa Chess Program. In a 4 game match, McCarthy lost two games and tied two games. The games were played via telegraph. -
Bet gained publicity, and involved more than $2000. McCarthy ended up losing the bet. -
Paper on situation Calculus
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Predicted ecommerce decades before its implementation.
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Awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery, USA, similar to Nobel Prize but for computer scientists. Awarded for his work on Artificial Intelligence.
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SAIL received national attention after the Rolling Stone Magazine wrote an article about SPACEWAR called "SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums"
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Awarded the Kyoto Prize honoring individuals who have made significant contributions in the fields of science, technology, arts, and philosophy. -
Demonstrated technology to the Homebrew Computer Club.
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He proposed in this article that machines can be said to have their own beliefs, and having a belief is characteristic of most machines capable of problem-solving.
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Responded with his famous "Chinese Room Argument" believing that machines can't have beliefs because they aren't conscious, they lack understanding or intentionality.
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Idea of a tower going up to space, kept vertical by force of stream of pellets along a conveyor belt.
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Became a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Became a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
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Became a member of the National Academy of Sciences
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Awarded for contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence. -
McCarthy's 1968 determination that a computer program could beat the world chess champion was finally successful.
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Short story about whether robots should have emotions
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Honors the greatest minds in science and engineering -
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Passed away in Stanford, California at the age of 84.
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Celebration of John McCarthy's acheivements in computer science and Artificial Intelligence during AAAI spring Symposium.
