The professor, who has made extensive studies in the field of artificial intelligence, also focused on the Lisp language. He is the first person to introduce the term artificial intelligence to the informatics literature.
John McCarthy was born on September 4, 1927, in Boston, USA, to an Irish immigrant family. He was the child of a family that had to move many times due to the economic crisis and whose economic situation was not very good. They moved to California when John was just two years old after his father got a job as an organizer in California.
Although he went to school late due to various health problems he had, he graduated from high school 2 years early thanks to his superior intelligence. McCarthy, who had already determined his educational plans, improved himself by studying advanced mathematics from university books and was exempted from advanced mathematics courses for the first two years at Caltech, where he was accepted in 1944.
John McCarthy, While serving in the army in World War II, aimed to decipher the Germans with his mathematical knowledge. He thought that if it were possible to write special programs for computers, computers could learn to think just like humans. After serving in the military for a while, he was re-admitted to Caltech and graduated in mathematics in 1948.
Comparing brains and computers at a symposium he attended at Caltech on "Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior" inspired John McCarthy for the idea of artificial intelligence. McCarthy, who embarked on a quest to develop machines that can think like humans, thus proved his saying "People prefer to deal with machines instead of dealing with bureaucracy".
After successfully graduating, McCarthy completed his doctoral thesis titled "Projection operators and partial differential equations" under the supervision of Donald C. Spencer and received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1951. After brief work at Princeton University and Stanford University, he became an assistant professor at Dartmouth University in 1955.
A year later, McCarthy joined MIT University as a research assistant in the fall of 1956. While working as a research assistant at MIT, he took part in a committee that developed the programming language ALGOL in 1956.
As a young academic, he organized the first artificial intelligence conference, the Dartmouth Conference, in 1956. While defining artificial intelligence at the conference, he said, “If all the features of learning and intelligence are defined down to the finest detail, computers can simulate them and as a result think like humans.”
Years later, he admitted that it was too early to make this statement, but added that he was confident that it would happen in the coming years. McCarthy believed that suitable software could be written for computers that would pass the Turing test. In order to achieve this, he introduced the concept of artificial intelligence and with his efforts, an artificial intelligence developed as a science.
When McCarthy came up with the idea of artificial intelligence, the Cold War between Russia and the United States was heating up. For this reason, the US Department of Defense provided great financial support to artificial intelligence research. In addition, the USA wanted to be a leader in the field of artificial intelligence, since it lagged behind Russia in the space race.
He wrote the Lisp language, which has been continuously developed and used for decades and is still used today, to use in the programs of artificial intelligence applications. Lisp language became the only language used in artificial intelligence products after 1959 and became the most preferred language of artificial intelligence program writers. This language has continued to evolve to this day, and dialects such as Emacs Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp, Scheme, and Autolisp have been written.
He then worked as a professor of mathematics at Stanford University from 1962 until his retirement in 2000. However, after his retirement, he continued to pursue his scientific studies at the university.
He founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford in 1965 and chaired this laboratory until 1980. He directed thirty doctoral dissertations on artificial intelligence. McCarthy, who developed the concept of artificial intelligence and opened the horizons of scientists, once again proved that artificial intelligence is important for the future of humanity.
He was entitled to receive the Turing Award, which is considered the most important award in this field, in 1971 for his achievements and contributions to computer science. McCarthy, who had a life full of success, died on October 24, 2011, at his home at Stanford.