The Uncommon Logician of Common Sense

"If you want the computer to have general intelligence, the other structure has to be commonsense knowledge and reasoning."
- John McCarthy

The inventor John McCarthy, born in Boston in 1927, was always fascinated by logic and common sense. His interests led him to California Institute of Technology in 1944 where he got his undergraduate degree in mathematics. After a lecture by John von Neumann at the Hixon Symposium on Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior at Cal Tech on self-replicating automata, McCarthy was left fascinated. The following year he transferred to Princeton University and began his PhD work in mathematics there. His thesis involved modeling "human intelligence on a machine" (23). In 1952, McCarthy, with some help from his fellow graduate students, decided to collect papers on the subject from all those who were interested in this research. Claude Shannon, the inventor of mathematical theory of communication, which is also known as information theory, worked with McCarthy to formalize the project under the name The Dartmouth 1956 Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. According to Shasha and Lazere, this project proved to be a groundbreaking event in computer science, "the ambitious goal for [which]...was to...'Proceed on the basis of the conjecture 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'" (25). The conference did not resolve many of the questions posed by the attendees, but a foundation for artificial intelligence in computer science was formed. Soon, list structures in logical reasoning, Lisp, situational calculus, and elaboration tolerance were researched and developed all in an attempt to reach McCarthy's major goal - "to make a machine that would be as intelligent as a human" (30). Computer scientists today are still working on it, but McCarthy has certainly laid down quite a foundation. The goal may be set very high, but the task is doable, and the difficulties uncovered by McCarthy and his colleagues [will] serve as 'keep off' warnings" for generations of programmers to come (36).