John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence (AI) and is recognized as the father of AI research. He founded two of the most important AI laboratories in the world and wrote the primary computer programming language for AI research, LISP (List Processing Language). While his quest for an intelligent machine has yet to be fulfilled, his work in computers has produced a number of other important advances, including interactive time-sharing, computer semantics, and one of the first proposals to link home computers to a public network.
The oldest of two brothers, McCarthy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 4, 1927. His father, John Patrick McCarthy, was an Irish immigrant and working-class militant. His mother, Ida Glatt, was a Jewish Lithuanian active in the suffrage movement. Both were members of the Communist party in the 1930s, so McCarthy is what is known among political activists as a "red diaper" baby. John Patrick McCarthy worked as a carpenter, a fisherman, a union organizer, and also as an inventor. He held two patents, one for a ship caulking machine and the other for a hydraulic orange juice squeezer. Young John McCarthy and his brother Patrick were raised to think politically and logically, and although McCarthy eventually decided that Marxism was hardly scientific, he never renounced science, logic, or politics.
McCarthy was a bookish lad whose health problems eventually spurred his family's move to Los Angeles. He attended public school and skipped three grades before entering the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) in 1944 with plans to become a mathematician. After several interruptions, including a stint as an army clerk, he graduated in 1948. From Cal Tech, McCarthy went to Princeton University, where he earned his doctorate in mathematics and took his first academic job as an instructor in mathematics in 1951. Two years later he became an acting assistant professor of mathematics at Stanford University before moving to Dartmouth College in 1955. While at Dartmouth in the summer of 1956, he was the principle organizer of the first conference on modeling intelligence in computers and coined the term artificial intelligence for the conference proposal. McCarthy was working on a chess-playing computer program at the time. In order to limit the moves the computer had to consider, McCarthy invented a search strategy and mathematical method that is now called the alpha-beta heuristic, which allowed the computer to eliminate any moves that permit the computer's opponent to quickly gain an advantage.
In 1958 McCarthy moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he became an associate professor and founded the first AI laboratory. It was here that McCarthy constructed the computer programming language called List Processing Language, or LISP, which is still the most common computer language used in AI research. He also began work on the idea of giving a computer "common sense"--a difficult problem that became the focus of many AI researchers in the late 1980s--and developed the first means of interactive time-sharing on computers which allows hundreds, or even thousands of people, to use one large computer at the same time. During his tenure at MIT, McCarthy married for the first time and had the first of his two daughters, Susan Joanne. In 1962 he moved his family to Stanford to take up a professorship in computer science and start a second AI laboratory. He has two other children, Sarah Kathleen and Timothy Talcott.
While at Stanford McCarthy continued to contribute to AI research in a number of ways, from mentoring many of the best young scientists in the field, to clarifying the different roles played by mathematical logic and common sense (called nonmonotonic reasoning by McCarthy) in AI. But his greatest contribution has been in the area of artificial languages, especially semantics. Philip J. Hilts, in his book Scientific Temperaments, quotes one mathematician on LISP: "The new expansion of man's view of the nature of mathematical objects, made possible by LISP, is exciting. There appears to be no limit to the diversity of problems to which LISP will be applied. It seems to be a truly general language, with commensurate computing power." In addition, McCarthy has speculated on machines that could make copies of themselves (automata) as well as artificial intelligence smarter than its creator.
McCarthy's adventurous impulses have not been confined to academic speculations. He has been a rock climber, a pilot, and he has even made a dozen parachute jumps. After McCarthy's first marriage ended in divorce in the 1960s, he married Vera Watson, a computer programmer and a world-class mountain climber. She was the first woman to solo the 22,800-foot Aconcagua peak in the Andes, and for a number of years she and McCarthy climbed lesser peaks together. Tragically, Watson died while a member of the women's expedition attempting to scale Annapurna peak in the Himalayas.
Politics have always been important to McCarthy, as they were to his parents. While he has called himself a reactionary because of his rejection of Marxism, in many ways his views defy simple categories. In the 1960s he was involved in many political campaigns and projects, such as the Free University in Palo Alto, California, but he eventually became disillusioned by the methods of some of the leftist groups with which he worked. Still, he felt that his own work on computer technology could benefit democracy by allowing people easy access to information. The danger of authoritarian control over computer technology led him to propose an extension of the Bill of Rights to cover electronic data and communications, an idea that became part of the national debate on computer networks in the 1990s. Specifically, McCarthy called for limiting control of public data files and allowing each person the right to read, correct, and limit access to his or her own files.
In 1971 McCarthy won the prestigious Alan Mathison Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, of which he is a member. In addition, he is a former president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He also received the Kyoto Prize in 1988 and the National Medal of Science in 1990. In 1987 he assumed the Charles M. Pigott chair of the Stanford University School of Engineering and became a professor in Stanford's Computer Science Department and director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
McCarthy has argued that making artificially intelligent robots that are more intelligent than human beings is quite possible, since (according to McCarthy) intelligence is made up of logic and common sense that can be mathematically represented. Despite his optimism in the goal of constructing intelligent machines, McCarthy has been one of the most rigorous critics of AI research. In a survey conducted in the 1970s and reprinted in his collection of essays, Formalizing Common Sense, McCarthy concluded that "artificial intelligence research has so far been only moderately successful; its rate of solid progress is perhaps greater than most social sciences and less than many physical sciences. This is perhaps to be expected, considering the difficulty of the problem."
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