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After playing a significant role in setting up the foundation for the creation of intelligent machines, John McCarthy, a renowned American computer scientist and inventor, was honored with the title Father of Artificial Intelligence. John McCarthy coined the term Artificial Intelligence and therefore is credited to be the founder of AI.
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John McCarthy, a renowned computer science giant and a pioneer in artificial intelligence, was born in Boston on September 4, 1927. McCarthy was born to a family of European immigrants during the Great Recession. The poor health of McCarthy’s younger brother led his family to settle in Los Angeles after moving throughout the country for a while in search of work opportunities.
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It was there that McCarthy, who was already good at mathematics, taught himself college-level mathematics by borrowing used textbooks from Caltech students before entering college.
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When he officially entered Caltech, he had already studied so much independently that his professors allowed him to skip the initial two courses. He graduated in the year 1948 and obtained his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton in 1951.
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Early in his life, John McCarthy attended a symposium on ‘Cerebral Mechanisms in Behaviour’, and it was here that the idea to create machines that could think as humans took birth in his mind.
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McCarthy’s next breakthrough came when he proposed ‘Advice Taker’ in his research paper ‘Programs with Common Sense’ in 1958. Advice Taker was a hypothetical computer program that would use logic to represent information in a computer.
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During the same time, the founder of artificial intelligence invented a new programming language called LISP, which is still used as a language in the field of artificial intelligence.
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John McCarthy gained much recognition between the 1950s and 1960s because of his stunning concept of time-sharing. McCarthy also invented the ‘garbage collection ‘method for solving problems in the programming language LISP around 1959.
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Between 1978 and 1986, McCarthy spent his time developing the circumscription method of non-monotonic reasoning.
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Throughout his journey, McCarthy's pioneering work has been recognized globally and has been awarded several accolades, including Turing Award by Association for Computing Machinery and Kyoto Prize.
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Near the end of the research stage of his career, in 1978, McCarthy had to give up on his purist idea of artificial intelligence. At the age of 84, the father of artificial intelligence left the world on October 24, 2011.