John McCarthy, Guru of Artificial Intelligence - Read about him in Resonance
Everyone in computer science knows a lot about John
McCarthy and his contributions. LISP was
the first programming language I fell in love with. His contributions to AI and
computer science are well-known, but I confess that I have never read his
biography so far, but I caught up a bit recently when Professor V Rajaraman
wrote a very interesting article about John McCarthy in the March 2014 issue of
Resonance, which is available online. Visit
I downloaded the PDF version of the article and read
it. As a bonus, there is another article in that issue by Dr Raman Chandrasekar
on the famous AI system named “Jeopardy!” which competes in TV quiz
programs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeopardy!
Let me offer a few tidbits to give you a feel for
Rajaraman’s article. He mentions McCarthy’s visit to IIT Kanpur and says it
inspired a number of students to take up computer science and that one of them
was Narayana Murthy! He also mentions that the parents of McCarthy had been immigrants
to the US, one from Ireland and one from Lithuania. Both had been members of
the American Communist Party.
McCarthy had done seminal work in Artificial
Intelligence, brought researchers together in the beginning of work in the
field; no wonder Rajaraman calls him Father of Artificial Intelligence. McCarthy
spent three years serving as Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the Stanford
University, but was not given tenure! I got reminded of young colleagues in
India who are very interested in inter-disciplinary research of potentially
great significance, but are scared that promotion committees may not do them
justice if they “stray” beyond the mainstream!
I do not wish to say any more about McCarthy’s ideas
and work in this blog post. I only wanted to attract a few more readers to
enjoy Prof Rajaraman article and to benefit from it. He has done a great job of elucidating the
important ideas that McCarthy had worked on.
Srinivasan Ramani
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