John McCarthy (computer Scientist) - Career in Computer Science

Career in Computer Science

After short-term appointments at Princeton, Stanford University, Dartmouth, and MIT, he became a full professor at Stanford during 1962, where he remained until his retirement at the end of 2000. By the end of his early days at MIT he was already affectionately referred to as "Uncle John" by his students.

McCarthy championed mathematical logic for artificial intelligence. During 1956, he organized the first international conference to emphasize artificial intelligence. One of the attendees was Marvin Minsky, who later became one of the main AI theorists and joined McCarthy at MIT during 1959. During the autumn of 1956, McCarthy won an MIT research fellowship. He served on the committee that designed ALGOL, which became a very influential programming language by introducing many new constructs now in common use. During 1958, he proposed the advice taker, which inspired later work on question-answering and logic programming. Around 1959, he invented so-called "garbage collection" methods to solve problems in Lisp. Based on the lambda calculus, Lisp soon became the programming language of choice for AI applications after its publication during 1960. He helped to motivate the creation of Project MAC at MIT, but left MIT for Stanford University during 1962, where he helped establish the Stanford AI Laboratory, for many years a friendly rival to Project MAC.

During 1961, he was the first to suggest publicly (in a speech given to celebrate MIT's centennial) that computer time-sharing technology might result in a future in which computing power and even specific applications could be sold through the utility business model (like water or electricity). This idea of a computer or information utility was very popular during the late 1960s, but faded by the mid-1990s. However, since 2000, the idea has resurfaced in new forms (see application service provider, grid computing, and cloud computing).

During 1966, McCarthy and his team at Stanford wrote a computer program used to play a series of chess games with counterparts in the Soviet Union; McCarthy's team lost two games and drew two games, see Kotok-McCarthy.

From 1978 to 1986, McCarthy developed the circumscription method of non-monotonic reasoning.

McCarthy is also credited with developing an early form of time-sharing. His colleague Lester Earnest told the Los Angeles Times: "The Internet would not have happened nearly as soon as it did except for the fact that John initiated the development of time-sharing systems. We keep inventing new names for time-sharing. It came to be called servers.… Now we call it cloud computing. That is still just time-sharing. John started it."

During 1982 he seems to have originated the idea of the "space fountain", a type of tower extending into space and kept vertical by the outward force of a stream of pellets propelled from Earth along a sort of conveyor belt which returns the pellets to Earth (payloads would ride the conveyor belt upward).

McCarthy often commented on world affairs on the Usenet forums. Some of his ideas can be found in his sustainability Web page, which is "aimed at showing that human material progress is desirable and sustainable". McCarthy was a serious book reader, an optimist, and a staunch supporter of free speech. His best Usenet interaction is visible in rec.arts.books archives. And John actively attended SF Bay Area dinners in Palo Alto of r.a.b. readers called rab-fests. John went on to defend free speech criticism involving European ethnic jokes at Stanford.

McCarthy saw the importance of mathematics and mathematics education which included a license plate guard on his BMW car noting: those who don't speak math are doomed to speak nonsense (paraphrased). He advised 30 PhD graduates.

His 2001 short story "The Robot and the Baby" farcically explored the question of whether robots should have (or simulate having) emotions, and anticipated aspects of Internet culture and social networking that became more prominent during the ensuing decade.