1971 约翰·麦卡锡

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John McCarthy
BIRTH:
4 September 1927, Boston, Massachusetts

DEATH:
24 October 2011, Stanford, California

EDUCATION:
BS mathematics, California Institute of Technology (1948); PhD mathematics, Princeton University (1951).

EXPERIENCE:
Private, U.S. Army (1945-1946); Instructor in mathematics, Princeton University (1951-1953); Assistant Professor of mathematics, Stanford University (1953-1955); Assistant Professor of mathematics, Dartmouth College (1955-1958); Assistant Professor of communication science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1958-1962); Professor of mathematics, Stanford University (1962-1965); Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University (1965-2011); Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1966-1980).

HONORS AND AWARDS:
Member of the National Academy of Engineering (1987) and National Academy of Sciences (1989); A.M. Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery (1971); Research Excellence Award of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1985); Kyoto Prize (1988); National Medal of Science (1990); Computer History Museum Fellow (1999); Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science (2003). He has also received many other honors and prizes from international associations and universities as well as from the United States government.



JOHN MCCARTHY DL Author Profile link
United States – 1971
CITATION
Dr. McCarthy's lecture "The Present State of Research on Artificial Intelligence" is a topic that covers the area in which he has achieved considerable recognition for his work.

ACM TURING AWARD
LECTURE
RESEARCH
SUBJECTS
John McCarthy was born September 4, 1927 in Boston, Massachusetts to immigrant parents. His father, John Patrick McCarthy, was an Irish Catholic who became a labor organizer and later the Business Manager of the Daily Worker, a national newspaper owned by the Communist Party USA. His mother, Ida Glatt, was a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant who worked for a wire service, then for the Daily Worker and finally as a social worker.

The family moved to New York City, but John was a sickly child and his parents took him to Los Angeles for his health. There he began reading books on mathematics at the nearby California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and when he was admitted there as an undergraduate in 1944 he was given advanced standing. He then was suspended for failing to attend physical education classes and spent some time in the U.S. Army, but still managed to graduate in 1948.

After a year of graduate studies at Caltech he went to Princeton and received a PhD in mathematics in 1951 based on a dissertation that solved a problem in partial differential equations. He taught there until 1953, when he became an assistant professor of mathematics at Stanford until 1955. One of his first major publications was a book (Automata Studies [11]) he and Claude Shannon co-edited during this period.
Having been raised by Communist parents, he became interested in the Soviet Union and developed friendships with several computer scientists there. He also learned to speak Russian and visited the Soviet Union a number of times and, in doing so, became aware of the human rights violations of that regime. He began taking an active role in support of the human rights of computer professionals and, over time, moved further away from Communist ideas. Vera Watson, his second wife, was the daughter of Russian missionaries living in China. She helped persuade him to move further to the right, and he became a conservative Republican. Unfortunately she died in a climbing accident in Nepal while trying to ascend Annapurna.

His work has emphasized epistemological problems—the problems of what information and what modes of reasoning are required for intelligent behavior. Given that McCarthy was primarily a mathematician and technologist who had little use for puffery, it is ironic that his most widely recognized contribution turned out to be in the field of marketing, specifically in choosing a brand name for the field. Having noticed that the title of the Automata Studies book didn’t stir up much excitement, when he subsequently moved to Dartmouth College he introduced the name artificial intelligence at a 1956 conference there [3] and saw that it was embraced both by people working in the field and the general public.


Moving on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1958, he and another Turing Award recipient, Marvin Minsky, formed the Artificial Intelligence Project there, where pioneering work took place in a wide range of fields from robotics, the theory of computation and common sense reasoning [4], to human-computer interfaces. McCarthy also created the LISP (LISt Processor) language [1]. It became an important tool in artificial intelligence research and is still widely used. He also made substantial contributions to the algebraic languages ALGOL 58 and 60.

McCarthy’s students developed the first computer program to convincingly play chess. It ran initially on an IBM 704 computer (later on an IBM 709 and 7090) and incorporated McCarthy’s version of an alpha-beta pruning scheme to reduce the number of positions that had to be considered.

In this period McCarthy observed the nearby development of the SAGE air defense system, which had been initiated by a computer group at MIT. It included timesharing support for many concurrent users at large screen displays with point-and-click interfaces. He wanted to use interactive computing in his research, but SAGE was a special purpose system that did not support interactive program development. He then came up with a scheme for creating general purpose timesharing and described it in a memorandum [5]. His approach inspired a number of groups in the MIT community to build such systems.


The first demonstration system, called CTSS, developed by Prof. Fernando Corbato and his colleagues, began operating in June 1962. McCarthy concurrently developed another timesharing system through his consultancy at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) with J.C.R. Licklider and Edward Fredkin, and it began working a few months later. CTSS led directly to the creation of Project MAC, which revolutionized computing at MIT and inspired the switch to timesharing systems in many places.


General purpose timesharing was an essential precursor to computer networking. The first general purpose computer network, created exclusively as a network of timesharing systems, was called ARPAnet and was conceived by J.C.R. Licklider, then specified by Dr. Lawrence Roberts and a group of academics who wanted to be able to collaborate by sharing resources and ideas. It was funded by the Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA), constructed by BBN and became operational around 1970. Its successor, the internet, has always depended on timesharing systems at its heart, which came to be called “servers.” All of that likely would have been delayed if McCarthy had not instigated timesharing system development in the early 1960s.

In late1962 McCarthy left MIT to return to Stanford University’s mathematics department as a full professor. He started a new Artificial Intelligence Project there, which was soon funded by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later called DARPA). He also initiated the development of the first display-based timesharing system, called Thor [6], which included many of the features found in modern personal computers and subsequently was used by others in the development of computer-aided instruction systems.

McCarthy also continued to develop his chess program, and in 1965 he challenged a group at the Moscow Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) to a match, with moves exchanged by telegraph. The competition received substantial media attention. Neither program did very well, although the Russian program won. The cryptic telegraphic exchanges were reportedly noticed by the Russian KGB security authorities, who investigated.

In 1968 McCarthy (and three others) bet Chess Master David Levy that a computer program would beat him at chess within the following 10 years. The bet gained publicity and eventually involved more than $2000 (a considerable sum for Levy, who was a graduate student in Glasgow at the time). McCarthy had to pay up, though a computer did eventually beat the world champion in 1997.

McCarthy always loved to hear about new ideas in almost any field, and generated many of them himself. He acquired many new high tech devices to see what he could do with them. He continued his work on mathematical theory of computation, and on developing programs with common sense including formalization of non-monotonic reasoning whereby people and computers draw conjectural conclusions by assuming that complications are absent from a situation [4, 9].

In 1965 the Stanford Computer Science Department spun off from Mathematics and became independent. McCarthy’s support from ARPA increased to include a million dollar computer facility, initially using a DEC PDP-6 timesharing system and later a DEC KA-10 computer. He recruited Lester Earnest as executive officer of the Project, and together they encouraged a diverse set of research projects to use the new facility when it became available in mid-1966.

McCarthy’s group made many significant contributions to a number of different computer related fields. The following paragraphs will give an indication of a few of the major projects that were done by this group.

McCarthy’s former student , and later Turing Award recipient, Raj Reddy, who did pioneering work in speech understanding, accepted a Stanford faculty appointment and scaled up that project. A music graduate student named John Chowning put together a computer music project and earned a faculty appointment. That project became a world leader in its field and eventually spun off as the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).

Following up on McCarthy’s interest in robotics, Lester Earnest initiated a hand-eye project that used information from a video camera to guide a robotic arm in doing assembly tasks, a project that was taken over by Jerome Feldman, a new faculty member. Ultimately, it led to the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon under the direction of Raj Reddy when he moved there. Earnest also put together a robot vehicle with the goal of guiding it by visual information from a video camera and McCarthy took that over. However the performance of that system turned out to be severely limited by the computer processing speeds then available.

Dr. Kenneth Colby brought in his Higher Mental Functions project that developed a conversational model of a paranoid called Parry and also developed a computer interface that helped autistic children.

In 1971 the Stanford AI Project became what might be the first computer facility anywhere in the world to put display terminals on everyone’s desk. Those terminals also provided access to various video cameras in the laboratory and to live television, which encouraged football fans to work on Saturdays and Sundays.

Concurrently, a small group of graduate students led by David Poole and Phil Petit were given support to develop SUDS (Stanford University Drawing System), the first display-based computer aided design system for digital systems, which they used to design a new computer that became the DEC KL-10. SUDS produced artwork for printed circuit cards and instructions for back panel wiring machines to facilitate automatic production. It became the primary design tool of Digital Equipment Corporation and a number of other corporations for many years.

By the early 1970s McCarthy had begun to think about the potential of networks of personal computers in the home and presented a paper on “The Home Information Terminal” [7]. Given that the diversity of projects had greatly expanded [8], in 1972 the name of the facility was changed to Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).

Vint Cerf’s development at Stanford of the TCP/IP protocols, upon which the internet was based, was supported by the same DARPA contract that supported SAIL. Over time SAIL produced many able PhDs and other graduates and became a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity that produced dozens of corporate spinoffs, both direct and indirect, including activities at Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, DE Shaw & Co., Amazon.com, Cisco Systems and Yamaha’s music synthesizer business. All of that was enabled by the diversity of SAIL projects that shared facilities and ideas.

Over time sixteen ACM Turing Awards have been given to people who had been affiliated with SAIL.

John McCarthy nominally retired at the end of 2000 but remained very active in developing and documenting new ideas. He passed away at age 84 at his Stanford home on 24 October 2011. He is survived by his first wife, Martha Coyote, and their two daughters Susan and Sarah McCarthy and his third wife, Carolyn Talcott, and their son Timothy McCarthy.

Author: Lester Earnest



约翰-麦卡锡
出生地：美国
1927年9月4日，波士顿，马萨诸塞州

逝世
2011年10月24日，斯坦福，加利福尼亚

学历：加州理工学院数学学士（1948年）；普林斯顿大学数学博士。
加州理工学院数学学士（1948）；普林斯顿大学数学博士（1951）。

经历：美国陆军二等兵。
美国陆军士兵（1945-1946）；普林斯顿大学数学讲师（1951-1953）；斯坦福大学数学助理教授（1953-1955）；达特茅斯学院数学助理教授（1955-1958）；麻省理工学院通信科学助理教授（1958-1962）；斯坦福大学数学教授（1962-1965）；斯坦福大学计算机科学教授（1965-2011）；斯坦福人工智能实验室主任（1966-1980）。

荣誉和奖项。
美国国家工程院院士（1987年）和美国国家科学院院士（1989年）；美国计算机协会图灵奖（1971年）；国际人工智能会议优秀研究奖（1985年）；京都奖（1988年）；国家科学奖章（1990年）；计算机历史博物馆研究员（1999年）；本杰明-富兰克林计算机和认知科学奖（2003年）。他还获得了来自国际协会和大学以及美国政府的许多其他荣誉和奖项。



约翰-麦卡锡（JOHN MCCARTHY）DL作者简介链接
美国 - 1971年
参考文献
麦卡锡博士的讲座 "人工智能研究的现状 "是一个涵盖了他的工作取得相当大认可的领域的主题。

亚马逊图灵奖
讲座
研究
题目
约翰-麦卡锡于1927年9月4日出生在马萨诸塞州的波士顿，父母都是移民。他的父亲约翰-帕特里克-麦卡锡是一名爱尔兰天主教徒，成为一名劳工组织者，后来成为美国共产党拥有的全国性报纸《工人日报》的业务经理。他的母亲伊达-格拉特（Ida Glatt）是立陶宛的犹太移民，曾在一家通讯社工作，后来在《工人日报》工作，最后成为一名社会工作者。

他们全家搬到了纽约，但约翰是个多病的孩子，为了健康，他的父母把他带到了洛杉矶。在那里，他开始在附近的加州理工学院（Caltech）阅读数学方面的书籍，当他在1944年被该校录取为本科生时，他获得了高级职称。随后，他因未参加体育课而被停学，并在美国军队中呆了一段时间，但仍设法于1948年毕业。

在加州理工学院读完一年的研究生后，他去了普林斯顿，并在1951年获得了数学博士学位，其论文解决了一个偏微分方程的问题。他在那里教书到1953年，然后成为斯坦福大学的数学助理教授到1955年。他最早的主要出版物之一是他和克劳德-香农在此期间共同编辑的一本书（自动机研究[11]）。
由于父母是共产党人，他对苏联产生了兴趣，并与那里的一些计算机科学家建立了友谊。他还学会了说俄语，并多次访问苏联，在此过程中，他意识到了该政权对人权的侵犯。他开始积极支持计算机专业人员的人权，并随着时间的推移，进一步远离了共产主义思想。他的第二任妻子薇拉-沃森（Vera Watson）是居住在中国的俄罗斯传教士的女儿。她帮助说服他进一步向右转，他成为一个保守的共和党人。不幸的是，她在尼泊尔试图登顶安纳普尔纳山时死于一场登山事故。

他的工作强调认识论问题--智能行为需要哪些信息和哪些推理模式的问题。鉴于麦卡锡主要是一位数学家和技术专家，对吹嘘没有什么用处，具有讽刺意味的是，他最广为人知的贡献竟然是在市场营销领域，特别是在为该领域选择一个品牌名称方面。他注意到《自动机研究》一书的书名并没有引起人们的兴奋，当他后来搬到达特茅斯学院时，他在1956年的一次会议上介绍了人工智能这一名称[3]，并看到它被该领域的工作人员和普通公众所接受。


1958年，他转到麻省理工学院（MIT），与另一位图灵奖获得者马文-明斯基（Marvin Minsky）在那里成立了人工智能项目，在机器人、计算理论和常识推理[4]以及人机界面等广泛领域开展了开创性工作。麦卡锡还创造了LISP（LISt处理器）语言[1]。它成为人工智能研究中的一个重要工具，至今仍被广泛使用。他还对代数语言ALGOL 58和60做出了重大贡献。

麦卡锡的学生开发了第一个能令人信服地下象棋的计算机程序。它最初在IBM 704计算机上运行（后来在IBM 709和7090上运行），并纳入了麦卡锡版本的α-β修剪方案，以减少必须考虑的位置的数量。

在这一时期，麦卡锡观察了附近的SAGE防空系统的发展，该系统由麻省理工学院的一个计算机小组发起。该系统包括在大屏幕显示器上支持许多并发用户的时空共享，并带有点选界面。他想在他的研究中使用互动计算，但SAGE是一个特殊用途的系统，不支持互动程序开发。于是他想出了一个创建通用分时的方案，并在一份备忘录中进行了描述[5]。他的方法激发了麻省理工学院社区的一些团体建立这样的系统。


第一个示范系统被称为CTSS，由Fernando Corbato教授和他的同事开发，于1962年6月开始运行。麦卡锡同时通过他在Bolt Beranek and Newman（BBN）的顾问公司与J.C.R. Licklider和Edward Fredkin一起开发了另一个分时系统，几个月后开始运行。CTSS直接导致了MAC项目的建立，它彻底改变了麻省理工学院的计算，并激发了许多地方转向分时系统。


通用分时系统是计算机网络的一个重要先驱。第一个专门作为分时系统网络创建的通用计算机网络被称为ARPAnet，由J.C.R. Licklider构思，然后由Lawrence Roberts博士和一群希望能够通过共享资源和想法进行合作的学者指定。它由预先研究项目局（ARPA）资助，由BBN建造，并在1970年左右开始运行。它的后继者，互联网，其核心一直依赖于分时系统，后来被称为 "服务器"。如果麦卡锡没有在20世纪60年代初煽动分时系统的发展，所有这些都可能被推迟。

1962年底，麦卡锡离开麻省理工学院，回到斯坦福大学的数学系担任全职教授。他在那里启动了一个新的人工智能项目，该项目很快得到了国防部高级研究计划局（ARPA，后来称为DARPA）的资助。他还发起了第一个基于显示的分时系统的开发，称为Thor[6]，其中包括现代个人电脑中的许多功能，随后被其他人用于开发计算机辅助教学系统。

麦卡锡还继续开发他的国际象棋程序，1965年，他向莫斯科理论和实验物理研究所（ITEP）的一个小组提出挑战，通过电报交换棋子进行比赛。这次比赛受到了媒体的广泛关注。这两个项目都没有做得很好，尽管俄罗斯的项目赢了。据报道，神秘的电报交流被俄罗斯克格勃安全当局注意到，他们进行了调查。

1968年，麦卡锡（和其他三人）与国际象棋大师大卫-李维打赌，说一个计算机程序会在接下来的10年内击败他的国际象棋。这个赌注得到了宣传，最终涉及到2000多美元（对于当时在格拉斯哥读研究生的李维来说，这是一笔不小的数目）。麦卡锡不得不付了钱，尽管一台计算机最终在1997年击败了世界冠军。

麦卡锡总是喜欢听到几乎所有领域的新想法，并且自己产生了许多新想法。他获得了许多新的高科技设备，看看他能用它们做什么。他继续研究计算的数学理论，以及开发有常识的程序，包括非单调推理的形式化，即人们和计算机通过假设情况中不存在复杂因素而得出猜想的结论[4, 9]。

1965年，斯坦福大学计算机科学系从数学系分离出来，成为独立的学科。麦卡锡从ARPA获得的支持增加到包括一个价值百万美元的计算机设施，最初使用DEC PDP-6分时系统，后来使用DEC KA-10计算机。他招募了Lester Earnest作为项目的执行官，当新设施在1966年中期投入使用时，他们一起鼓励各种研究项目使用该设施。

麦卡锡的小组对许多不同的计算机相关领域做出了许多重大贡献。以下段落将介绍该小组完成的几个主要项目。

麦卡锡以前的学生，后来的图灵奖获得者拉吉-雷迪，在语音理解方面做了开创性的工作，他接受了斯坦福大学的教职，扩大了该项目规模。一位名叫约翰-乔宁（John Chowning）的音乐研究生组建了一个计算机音乐项目，并获得了一份教职任命。该项目成为该领域的世界领导者，并最终分拆为音乐和声学计算机研究中心（CCRMA）。

在麦卡锡对机器人感兴趣的基础上，莱斯特-欧内斯特发起了一个手眼项目，该项目使用来自摄像机的信息来指导机械臂进行装配任务，该项目由新教员杰罗姆-费尔德曼接手。最终，在拉吉-雷迪（Raj Reddy）搬到卡内基-梅隆大学后，该项目导致卡内基-梅隆大学的机器人研究所在拉吉-雷迪的指导下成立。欧内斯特还组建了一个机器人车辆，目的是通过视频摄像头的视觉信息来引导它，麦卡锡接手了这个项目。然而，该系统的性能被当时的计算机处理速度所严重限制。

肯尼斯-科尔比博士带来了他的高级心理功能项目，开发了一个名为帕里的偏执狂对话模型，还开发了一个帮助自闭症儿童的计算机界面。

1971年，斯坦福大学人工智能项目成为世界上第一个将显示终端放在每个人的桌子上的计算机设施。这些终端还提供了对实验室中各种摄像机和电视直播的访问，这鼓励了足球迷在周六和周日工作。

同时，由大卫-普尔和菲尔-佩蒂特领导的一小群研究生得到了开发SUDS（斯坦福大学绘图系统）的支持，这是第一个基于显示的数字系统计算机辅助设计系统，他们用它来设计一台新的计算机，后来成为DEC KL-10。SUDS为印刷电路板制作图样，为背板接线机制作说明，以促进自动生产。多年来，它成为数字设备公司和其他一些公司的主要设计工具。

到70年代初，麦卡锡已经开始思考家庭中个人计算机网络的潜力，并提交了一篇关于 "家庭信息终端 "的论文[7]。鉴于项目的多样性已经大大扩展[8]，1972年，该设施的名称被改为斯坦福人工智能实验室（SAIL）。

Vint Cerf在斯坦福大学开发的TCP/IP协议，是互联网的基础，得到了支持SAIL的同一DARPA合同的支持。随着时间的推移，SAIL培养了许多有能力的博士和其他毕业生，并成为创业活动的温床，产生了几十个直接和间接的企业附带产品，包括微软、太阳微系统、DE Shaw & Co.、亚马逊网站、思科系统和雅马哈的音乐合成器业务等活动。所有这些都是由SAIL项目的多样性促成的，这些项目共享设施和想法。

随着时间的推移，16个ACM图灵奖已经颁发给了与SAIL有关的人。

约翰-麦卡锡在2000年底名义上退休了，但在发展和记录新想法方面仍然非常活跃。2011年10月24日，他在斯坦福的家中去世，享年84岁。他的第一任妻子Martha Coyote和他们的两个女儿Susan和Sarah McCarthy以及第三任妻子Carolyn Talcott和他们的儿子Timothy McCarthy在世。

作者。莱斯特-欧内斯特