Understanding John McCarthy
There is a hero in every field who has changed the way their domain how works. They also created a decade or century-long advancements in just months or a few years. In this article, we will learn about one of these heroes: John McCarthy. We are really grateful for his role in co-founding of the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and timesharing systems, and for major contributions to mathematics and computer science. He became a leader in wherever he participated, sometimes in politics, sometimes in science. For now, we will focus only on the scientific aspect of his biography.
McCarthy was born in Boston Massachusetts, on September 4, 1927. His father was an Irish immigrant and his mother a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant.
Education:
Firstly, he graduated from Belmont Senior High School two years early, which is located in Los Angeles, California. It was once the largest school in California. Then, he was accepted into Caltech in 1944. Caltech name is the brand of the California Institute of Technology, which is a private research university in Pasadena, California. Later, he skip the first two years of mathematics at Caltech, thanks to his personal works. Following this, he received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1948. Bachelor of science (BS) or Bachelor of Arts (BA) is an undergraduate degree in which you study a subject of your choice at an academic institution, and is commonly known as a college degree. In 1951, success in obtaining a doctorate with a dissertation on “Projection operators and partial differential equations”, under the supervision of Donald C. Spencer.
The Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey. The Ivy League is an American collegiate athletic conference, comprising eight private research universities in the Northeastern United States. Then, John McCarthy became an assistant professor at Darthmouth College between 1955 and 1958, where he worked also on the earliest time-sharing systems. He moved to MIT and stood in 1958 to 1962 as a research fellow. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private land-grant research university. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and established in 1861. A land-grant is an institution of higher education in the United States. The university has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and science. Later, 35 years old McCarthy became a full professor at Stanford as from 1962 until 2000.
Birth of “Artificial Intelligence”:
Let’s delve deeper into the “Artificial Intelligence” topic. In 1950s, McCarthy discovered that primitive recursive functions could be extended to compute with symbolic expressions. Before starting, we will learn a little about this term:
Primitive recursive function is a function that can be computed by a computer program whose loops are all “for” loops.
Let’s see some basic examples to understand clearly what it is:
Example 1 (The “Zero” function)
We can see that we have defined our function Z(x) as “0”, which means it will always return “0” regardless of the input.
Example 2 (The “Successor” function)
Here, we can see that we have defined our function Z(x) as “x+1”, which means it will always return “x+1” of the input.
And the last and the complex one:
Example 3 (The “Projection” function)
Finally here, we can see that we have defined “n = 3”, which means it have 3 numbers. And we have defined “i=2” so the function will take the second number in the list.
McCarthy coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” first in 1955 in a summer workshop at Dartmouth College. Then invented next the programming language LISP in 1958 following the Dartmouth Conference of 1956. The name is an acronym of “List Processing Language”. It belongs to the functional language paradigm, contrary to the object-oriented languages. Functional programming is a paradigm of building computer programs using expressions and functions without mutating state and data. It is one of the declarative paradigms with logic programming. Consequently, this language was used primarily by the AI community after its publication in 1960…
End of Part 1.
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