When and where was John McCarthy born?
John McCarthy was born in Boston, Massachusetts on the 4th of September 1927. His father came from Cromane, a small fishing village in County Kerry, Ireland.
Questions about John McCarthy (computer scientist)
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What did John McCarthy do at Dartmouth College in 1956?
John McCarthy co-authored a proposal for a workshop at Dartmouth College that took place in the summer of 1956. This event officially started artificial intelligence as a distinct field of study and he coined the term within that document.
How did John McCarthy influence programming language development in the late 1950s?
John McCarthy discovered primitive recursive functions could compute symbolic expressions which produced the Lisp programming language. He also invented garbage collection methods to manage memory automatically around 1959.
Who debated John McCarthy about machine reasoning and when did they argue?
Hubert Dreyfus was a philosophy professor at Berkeley University who opposed John McCarthy throughout their professional careers. John Searle responded with the Chinese Room Argument in 1980 after John McCarthy wrote Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines in 1979.
When did John McCarthy die and what awards did he receive during his life?
John McCarthy died at his home in Stanford on the 24th of October 2011. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1971, won the Kyoto Prize in 1988, and earned the National Medal of Science in 1990.