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Coined 【杜撰=生造】 筆者認爲：可翻譯爲“敲定”或“欽定”。
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Computer Scientist Coined 'Artificial Intelligence'Wall Street Journal - Stephen Miller - 25 Oct 2011 Collaborating with other pioneers of early computing, Mr. McCarthy worked on one of ...intelligence with Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. ... |
Wall Street Journal |
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203911804576653530510986612.html
By STEPHEN MILLER
John McCarthy helped found the study of artificial intelligence, named the discipline and spent decades making computers understand things that for humans arecommon sense.
John McCarthy, who helped pioneer computer chess, played a match in 1966. He came to think the game was a distraction for programmers.
He devised the programming language Lisp, a favored tool of software developers for more than a half-century.
Mr. McCarthy, who died Monday at age 84, brought a mathematician's rigor to computing. "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense," he wrote in a 1995 paper.
Collaborating with other pioneers of early computing, Mr. McCarthyworked on one of the first chess-playing programs withBritish researcher Alan Turing and edited an early volume of papers onartificial intelligencewith Claude Shannon, the father of information theory.
Mr. McCarthy coined the phrase "artificial intelligence" for a 1956 conference he organized at Dartmouth College with longtime collaboratorMarvin Minsky, Mr. Shannon and others that is widely considered the crucible of the field.
He proposed Lisp in 1958 as a way to process more sophisticated mathematics thanFortran, the dominant programming language of the day. Later, Mr. McCarthy becamean architect of computer time-sharing. He envisioned dial-up networking and imagined a metered utilitysimilar to cloud computing.
Mr. McCarthy "really encapsulated what computation meant," Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google, told Wired magazine. "He was the first one to really put the essence of computing intoa simple programming language."
The son of a labor organizer and a women's suffrage activist, Mr. McCarthy was a "red-diaper baby," with both of his parents active in the Communist Party. During the Depression, his family lost their home in Boston and moved around before settling in Southern California, where his father, a sometime inventor, developed a hydraulic orange-juice squeezer.
Despite starting school late, Mr. McCarthy skipped grades and taught himselfenough calculusto take math graduate courses as a 16-year-old freshmanat California Institute of Technology. His application essay was a single sentence: "I intend to bea professor of mathematics."
After graduate studies at Princeton, Mr. McCarthy held appointments at Dartmouth,Stanford and theMassachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1957, Mr. McCarthy teamed up with Mr. Minsky to found M.I.T.'s AI laboratory. He laterreturned to Stanford and founded an AI laboratorywhere he worked on early versions of a self-driving car. He produced papers on robot consciousness and free will and worked on ways of making programs understand or mimic human common-sense decision-making more effectively. Often his topics were seemingly trivial, such as making a computer create a plan to get to the airport.
Mr. McCarthy was twice married, the second time to Vera Watson, an International Business Machines Corp. computer programmer and mountaineer who was the first woman to solo climb to the summit of Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Americas. She died in 1978 from a fall while on an all-women expedition to Annapurna, a Himalayan peak in Nepal.
In recent years, Mr. McCarthy told interviewers that AI had a long way to go and that not enough was understood about thought processes.
Although he helped pioneer computer chess, Mr. McCarthy came to think the game was a distraction for programmers.
"Chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila," Mr. McCarthy wrote in the journal Science in 1997. "We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies."
Noting that IBM's computer Deep Bluehad finally defeated world champion Garry Kasparov, Mr. McCarthy added, "It is time for chess to become a Drosophila again."
Write to Stephen Miller at [email protected]