Father of Artificial Intelligence

John McCarthy, an American computer scientist pioneer and inventor, was known as the father of Artificial Intelligence (AI). After working in this field he dedicated his work towards the development of intelligent machines.

The co scientist stated the term in 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, the first artificial intelligence conference. The objective for this was to develop a machine that could reason like a human, was capable of solving the real time problem and self-improving. He believed that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it”.

It was a challenge for him as still it is for most computer designers today. McCarthy said confidently but never dismissed that the breakthrough might come in five to 500 years. In 1958 after creating a computer language Lips, which became a standard AI programming language and continues to be used today, not just in robotic machines and other applications but in a IOT based services, from airline scheduling to email spam filtering; also find the way to voice recognition technology, and now today as a google assistance application in android.

Describing on “focused on the future”, McCarthy was “always inventing and researching and in the 1960s he also invented the idea of computer time sharing and networking, which allowed users to share data by linking to a server computer; which lowered the cost of using computers. The fact is now that has become the significant contribution to the development of the internet, and start of cloud computing.

 

Father of Artificial Intelligence

About McCarthy:  John McCarthy was born in Boston to Irish and Lithuanian immigrants in 1927. During the bad time of his family moved many times, eventually arriving in Los Angeles, where his father was an organizer for a clothing workers’ union and his mother was active in the women’s suffrage movement.

McCarthy was self-taught in mathematics, he secured an UG place at Esteemed CIT from where he Graduated in 1948.

In 1951, he received his PhD in Math. And become a full professor at Stanford in 1962 and work until retirement.

John McCarthy, computer scientist: born Boston, Massachusetts 4 September 1927; died Stanford, California 24 October 2011.