Former Dartmouth math Professor John McCarthy, a pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence who organized the first Dartmouth conference on the subject, died in his home on Monday in Stanford, Calif., at the age of 84, The New York Times reported. Complications from heart disease caused his death, his daughter Sarah McCarthy said in an interview with The Times.
McCarthy introduced the term "Artificial Intelligence," which established it as a research discipline, according to an original grant proposal dated Aug. 31, 1955, and obtained by The Dartmouth. McCarthy helped lead the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence conference, which explored potential models for thinking and human interactions with personal robots and other "intelligent" machines, the proposal said. The conference also discussed the role of Artificial Intelligence in improving networking and reasoning, according to the proposal.
Everyone at the conference was "groping" for ideas, fellow conference leader and former Dartmouth professor Trenchard More said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"You would be surprised at how vague everything was," More said. "I watched one very good scientist after another say that A.I. was just pure nonsense."
McCarthy was a leader in the field at an early stage and is responsible for numerous key advances in computing, math professor emeritus Robert Norman said. After leaving the College in 1958, McCarthy co-founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with conference co-leader Marvin Minsky, according to More. McCarthy also created Lisp Processing Language, or Lisp, which became the most frequently used language for artificial intelligence research and design, according to More.
McCarthy was known for having an outstanding "very dry sense of humor," math professor emeritus Richard Williamson said. McCarthy's coining of the term "Lisp" for his programming language was intended to be humorous, according to Williamson.
"That's McCarthy he knew it was a joke," Williamson said.
While working at MIT, McCarthy also pioneered a new technique known as "garbage collection" to ensure automatic memory management and solve problems with Lisp, The Times reported. The method is still routinely relied upon in modern programming languages like Java, according to The Times.
While at Stanford University, McCarthy began inviting the Homebrew Computer Club a Silicon Valley hobbyist club that cultivated the interest of computing leaders such as Apple founders Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak to meet at his lab. Medical device consultant Bob Lash, who was active in the Homebrew Computer Club during its first year, remembers sneaking in to McCarthy's lab while a student at Palo Alto High School, Lash said in an email to The Dartmouth.
"One night a student very proudly showed us a large rack mount cabinet that contained one million words' of memory for their [data processor]," Lash said in a statement on his website. "We were completely wide-eyed."
At Stanford, McCarthy also created the first time-sharing system for mainframe computers, The Times reported. This discovery, considered by many to be a major milestone in the history of computer software, enabled many individuals and organizations to simultaneously access information from a single computer source. This dramatically reduced costs and paved the way for the interactive computing so ubiquitous in modern society, according to The Times.
McCarthy also founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, which employs over 20 Stanford faculty members today.
Although McCarthy never anticipated the emergence of the personal computer, he foresaw the enormous impact that computers and other technological advances would have on the modern world well before his contemporaries. Despite his numerous discoveries, he incorrectly predicted the emergence of an entirely different computing system that revolved around simplistic and relatively inexpensive terminals linked to one central mainframe, according to The Times.
McCarthy was born in Boston on Sept. 4, 1927, to a family of politically active members of the Communist party. His father, an Irish immigrant, was a prominent champion of organized labor, while his mother, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, participated in the suffrage movement, The Times reported.
McCarthy studied as an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology beginning in 1944 and ultimately completed his graduate degree at Princeton University, according to The Times.
In 1971, McCarthy won the Turing Award, the most prestigious honor awarded by the Association of Computing Machinery, for his achievements in artificial intelligence. His research received the Kyoto Prize in 1988, the National Medal of Science in 1991 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2003, The Times reported.
In 2005, the College hosted The Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years to commemorate the initial conference facilitated by McCarthy, according to the conference's website. Approximately 175 participants from across the world attended the event, the website said.
McCarthy is survived by his wife, Carolyn Talcott, his son, Timothy, and his daughters, Sarah and Susan McCarthy.
Carolyn Talcott did not respond to requests for comment by press time. Timothy and Sarah McCarthy could not be reached for comment by press time.
Lindsay Ellis contributed to the reporting of this article.
