[ExI] John McCarthy — Father of AI and Lisp — Dies at 84

[Dave Sill]

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/john-mccarthy-father-of-ai-and-lisp-dies-at-84/

When IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer won its famous chess rematch with then
world champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997, the victory was hailed far and
wide as a triumph of artificial intelligence. But John McCarthy — the man
who coined the term and pioneered the field of AI research — didn’t see it
that way.

As far back as the mid-60s, chess was called the “Drosophila of artificial
intelligence” — a reference to the fruit flies biologists used to uncover
the secrets of genetics — and McCarthy believed his successors in AI
research had taken the analogy too far.

“Computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists
had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing
Drosophila,” McCarthy wrote following Deep Blue’s win. “We would have some
science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies.”

According Daphne Koller — a professor in the Stanford AI Lab who still
carries the torch for McCarthy’s orthodox vision of artificial intelligence
— it’s a quote that sums up both McCarthy and his work. “The word that bests
describes him is ‘uncompromising’,” she tells Wired. “He believed in
artificial intelligence in terms of building an artifact that could actually
replicate human level intelligence, and because of this, we was very unhappy
with a lot AI today, which provides some very useful applications but
focuses on machine learning.

“He wanted AI to pass the Turing test.”

John McCarthy died on Monday at the age of 84, according to Stanford
University, where he served on the faculty for almost four decades. In
organizing the Dartmouth Summer Research Conference on Artificial
Intelligence in 1956, McCarthy not only added a term to the popular lexicon,
he founded an entirely new area of research alongside fellow pioneers Marvin
Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. In the years to come, he
would go on invent LISP — one of the world’s most influential programming
languages — and he played a major role in the development of time-sharing
systems.

“Without time-sharing, you wouldn’t have the modern internet,” says Lester
Earnest, who worked with McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) in the late fifties and later at the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Lab (SAIL), the research operation McCarthy helped found in
1962.

But for all his influence over today’s world, McCarthy envisioned something
much greater. Says Google’s Sebastian Thrun, who revived SAIL in 2003 before
joining Google to build the company’s self-driving cars: “When it came to
artificial intelligence, he was a philosopher.”

Sharing Time

Lester Earnest first encountered McCarthy at MIT while working on the
government’s Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) defense system — an
early computer network that allowed multiple users to access the system at
the same time — and according to Earnest, SAGE inspired McCarthy’s work on
time-sharing. “He was first to come up with an idea of how to do
time-sharing in a general purpose way, as opposed to special purpose,”
Earnest says.

A McCarthy paper gave rise to the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) —
which was demonstrated at MIT in 1961 — and a similar system McCarthy helped
build at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, a private consultancy that would later
play a big part in the founding of the internet.

But for McCarthy, time-sharing took a backseat to AI. At MIT, he founded an
“AI group” alongside fellow Dartmouth artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin
Minsky, and this eventually spawned the university’s Project Mac, a DARPA
(Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)-funded effort that would help
lead the field for years.

While at MIT, McCarthy developed LISP, which became the standard programming
language of the artificial intelligence community, but would also permeate
the computing world at large. Today, it’s the second oldest high-level
programming language still in use — after Fortran. But unlike Fortran, it’s
still feeding new languages.

“[McCarthy] really encapsulated what computation meant,” says Peter Norvig,
the director of research at Google, pointing to modern languages like
JavaScript and Python as Lisp’s successors. “To some extent, that had been
done before. People like Turing had a mathematical way of defining
computing. But he was the first one to really put the essence of computing
into a simple programming language, and that had a big effect on a lot of
people.”

SAIL and beyond

As Project Mac evolved, McCarthy left for Stanford, where he founded SAIL, a
longtime rival to the MIT effort. Lester Earnest would later join McCarthy
at the lab, and he sees it as a place that helped spawn so much the modern
tech world — a notion that’s seconded by Google’s Sebastian Thrun, who
points to everything from the robotics work done at SAIL to the user
interface and programming work.

Earnest says the lab’s influence is exemplified by Alan Kay, who studied at
the lab before moving onto the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he
invented object-oriented programming with his SmallTalk language, citing
McCarthy and Lisp as a major influence. Kay would later call Lisp the
“greatest single programming language ever designed.”

In the 80s and 90s, the lab fell out of favor. “AI went through a winter
period,” says Google’s Sebastian Thrun. “There was a mismatch between the
promises that were made and reality. People realized we couldn’t duplicate
human intelligence.” But in 2003, Thrun revived SAIL and — in at least some
ways — the McCarthy spirit.

Like Daphne Koller, Thrun says that today’s AI work didn’t always agree with
McCarthy’s sensibilities. “In my mind, Google is all about artificial
intelligence,” he says. “But McCarthy was troubled by this. He would come to
me regularly and tell me I was doing the wrong thing.”

Thrun would respectfully disagree. “I know how to do my thing right, not
your thing,” he would tell McCarthy. But Thrun acknowledges that one day,
McCarthy will win the day. “What he stood for matters,” Thrun says.

“The point will come when we do understand human reasoning.”
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