From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John McCarthy may refer to:

Government

• John McCarthy (ambassador) (born 1942), Australian ambassador
• John H. McCarthy (1850–1908), U.S. Representative from New York
• John McCarthy (Nebraska) (1857–1943), Nebraska Republican politician
• John McCarthy (MP), Member of Parliament for Mid Tipperary, 1892–1893
• John George MacCarthy, Member of Parliament for Mallow, 1874–1880

Science

• John McCarthy (computer scientist) (born 1927), American computer scientist
• John McCarthy (linguist) (born 1953), American phonologist

Sports

• John McCarthy (referee), mixed martial arts referee
• Johnny McCarthy, NBA player
• Johnny McCarthy (baseball), Major League Baseball first baseman
• John McCarthy (footballer), Gaelic footballer
• Two Australian rules footballers:
  • John McCarthy (Australian rules footballer), (born 1967), former player with Fitzroy and North Melbourne
  • John McCarthy (Australian footballer), (born 1989), current player with Collingwood

Other

• John McCarthy (journalist) (born 1956), British hostage and journalist
• John McCarthy (bishop) (1815–1893), Irish bishop
• John McCarthy, Jr., Oscar-nominated set decorator
• John Edward McCarthy (1911–1977), American radio personality
• John McCarthy (guitarist), guitarist

See also

• Jon McCarthy (born 1970), English former professional footballer
• Jack McCarthy (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same personal name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

From Wikiquote

It's difficult to be rigorous about whether a machine really 'knows', 'thinks', etc., because we're hard put to define these things. We understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming.

John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and is the inventor of the Lisp programming language.

Sourced

• In 1936 the notion of a computable function was clarified by Turing, and he showed the existence of universal computers that, with an appropriate program, could compute anything computed by any other computer. [...] In some subconscious sense even the sales departments of computer manufacturers are aware of this, and they do not advertise magic instructions that cannot be simulated on competitors machines, but only that their machines are faster, cheaper, have more memory, or are easier to program.
  • "Towards a Mathematical Science of Computation", Information Processing 1962: Proceedings of IFIP Congress 62, ed. Cicely M. Popplewell (Amsterdam, 1963), pp. 21–28

• Intelligence has two parts, which we shall call the epistemological and the heuristic. The epistemological part is the representation of the world in such a form that the solution of problems follows from the facts expressed in the representation. The heuristic part is the mechanism that on the basis of the information solves the problem and decides what to do.
  [...]
  The right way to think about the general problems of metaphysics and epistemology is not to attempt to clear one's own mind of all knowledge and start with 'Cogito ergo sum' and build up from there. Instead, we propose to use all of our knowledge to construct a computer program that knows. The correctness of our philosophical system will be tested by numerous comparisons between the beliefs of the program and our own observations and knowledge.
  • "Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence", Sect. 2.1, Machine Intelligence 4, ed. Donald Michie (Elsevier, 1969), p. 463 ff., ISBN 0444197443

• Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem solving performance. However, the machines mankind has so far found it useful to construct rarely have beliefs about beliefs, although such beliefs will be needed by computer programs that reason about what knowledge they lack and where to get it. Mental qualities peculiar to human-like motivational structures , such as love and hate, will not be required for intelligent behavior, but we could probably program computers to exhibit them if we wanted to, because our common sense notions about them translate readily into certain program and data structures. Still other mental qualities, e.g. humor and appreciation of beauty, seem much harder to model.
  • "Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines" (1979) Sect. 1: Introduction. Reprinted in Formalizing Common Sense: Papers By John McCarthy, 1990, ISBN 0893915351

• When we program a computer to make choices intelligently after determining its options, examining their consequences, and deciding which is most favorable or most moral or whatever, we must program it to take an attitude towards its freedom of choice essentially isomorphic to that which a human must take to his own.
  • "Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines" (1979) Sect. 5.5: Free Will. Reprinted in Formalizing Common Sense: Papers By John McCarthy, 1990, ISBN 0893915351

• It's difficult to be rigorous about whether a machine really 'knows', 'thinks', etc., because we're hard put to define these things. We understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming.
  • "The Little Thoughts of Thinking Machines", Psychology Today, December 1983, pp. 46–49. Reprinted in Formalizing Common Sense: Papers By John McCarthy, 1990, ISBN 0893915351

• Program designers have a tendency to think of the users as idiots who need to be controlled. They should rather think of their program as a servant, whose master, the user, should be able to control it. If designers and programmers think about the apparent mental qualities that their programs will have, they'll create programs that are easier and pleasanter — more humane — to deal with.
  • "The Little Thoughts of Thinking Machines", Psychology Today, December 1983, pp. 46–49. Reprinted in Formalizing Common Sense: Papers By John McCarthy, 1990, ISBN 0893915351

• Whenever we write an axiom, a critic can say that the axiom is true only in a certain context. With a little ingenuity the critic can usually devise a more general context in which the precise form of the axiom doesn't hold. [...] There simply isn't a most general context.
  • "Generality in Artificial Intelligence" (1971–1987), ACM Turing Award Lectures: The First Twenty Years, ACM Press, 1987, ISBN 0201077949

• He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
  • PROGRESS AND ITS SUSTAINABILITY (1995 – )

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

John McCarthy (computer scientist)

• John McCarthy's Home Page at stanford.edu
• ACM Turing Award Citation