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John McCarthy

Original nameJohn McCarthy

American Computer Scientist, Coiner of the Term "Artificial Intelligence"

Those Who Conceived That "a Machine Could Think" · Pioneers

Coining "Artificial Intelligence"The Dartmouth ConferenceThe LISP Programming Language

Who they are

John McCarthy (1927–2011) was an American computer scientist who in 1955 first used the term "Artificial Intelligence" in a proposal for an academic workshop, and the two-month workshop he chaired at Dartmouth College in 1956 is thereafter acknowledged as the landmark event marking the formal birth of AI as an independent discipline, its attendees including Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, Herbert Simon, and Allen Newell, who all became founding figures of the field. McCarthy in 1958 designed the LISP programming language, the second-oldest high-level programming language still in use, long the mainstream tool language of AI research. He also proposed an "axiomatic" path of AI research, advocating the use of formal logic to represent common-sense knowledge and reasoning, a symbolist tradition that thereafter long developed in parallel and competition with the connectionist path represented by deep learning. McCarthy won the Turing Award in 1971 for his foundational contribution to AI.

Primary sourcesThe original 1955 Dartmouth conference proposalThe 1960 design paper of the LISP language

Key stories

A Summer Workshop That Named a New Discipline

In 1956 McCarthy persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a two-month summer workshop at Dartmouth College, the proposal stating the conference’s premise that "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it," a statement thereafter seen as the earliest programmatic manifesto of AI. Fewer than ten attended, including Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon, and this conference is thereafter acknowledged as marking the birth of AI as an independent discipline; though it reached no concrete technical breakthrough, the term "artificial intelligence" McCarthy proposed in the proposal has been used ever since.

Relationships

Mentor

🔓Alan Turing

Ally

🧩Marvin Minsky　Jointly organized the Dartmouth conference and thereafter co-founded the MIT AI Laboratory ♟️Claude Shannon　The two co-edited the 1956 collection Automata Studies 📐Newell and Simon　Fellow attendees of the Dartmouth conference 🎲Arthur Samuel　Both representative figures of the 1950s founding generation of AI

Echoes today

Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.

The lasting life of the term "artificial intelligence"This term McCarthy chose on the spot for a funding proposal has been in use for near seventy years since, to this day the most widely known name of the discipline, though McCarthy himself in later years said the naming was somewhat of an overstatement.

Appears in

"Can Machines Think?" — The Birth of AITuring’s Question and the Dartmouth Conference

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