The Origin Story

John McCarthy’s interest in computers was spurred in 1948, when he attended a seminar, called “Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior,” which covered the topic of how machines would eventually be able to think. Some of the participants included the leading pioneers in the field such as John von Neumann, Alan Turing, and Claude Shannon.

McCarthy continued to immerse himself in the emerging computer industry—including a stint at Bell Labs—and in 1956, he organized a ten-week research project at Dartmouth University. He called it a “study of artificial intelligence.” It was the first time the term had been used.

The attendees included academics like Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Allen Newell, O. G. Selfridge, Raymond Solomonoff, and Claude Shannon. All of them would go on to become major players in AI.

The goals for the study were definitely ambitious:

The study is 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. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.⁵

At the conference, Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert Simon demoed a computer program called the Logic Theorist, which they developed at the Research and Development (RAND) Corporation. The main inspiration came from Simon (who would win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978). When he saw how computers printed out words on a map for air defense systems, he realized that these machines could be more than just about processing numbers. It could also help with images, characters, and symbols—all of which could lead to a thinking machine.

Regarding Logic Theorist, the focus was on solving various math theorems from Principia Mathematica. One of the solutions from the software turned out to be more elegant—and the co-author of the book, Bertrand Russell, was delighted.

Creating the Logic Theorist was no easy feat. Newell, Shaw, and Simon used an IBM 701, which used machine language. So they created a high-level language, called IPL (Information Processing Language), that sped up the programming. For several years, it was the language of choice for AI.

The IBM 701 also did not have enough memory for the Logic Theorist. This led to another innovation: list processing. It allowed for dynamically allocating and deallocating memory as the program ran.

Bottom line: The Logic Theorist is considered the first AI program ever developed.

Despite this, it did not garner much interest! The Dartmouth conference was mostly a disappointment. Even the phrase “artificial intelligence” was criticized.

Researchers tried to come up with alternatives, such as “complex information processing.” But they were not catchy like AI was—and the term stuck.

As for McCarthy, he continued on his mission to push innovation in AI. Consider the following:

• During the late 1950s, he developed the Lisp programming language, which was often used for AI projects because of the ease of using nonnumerical data. He also created programming concepts like recursion, dynamic typing, and garbage collection. Lisp continues to be used today, such as with robotics and business applications. While McCarthy was developing the language, he also co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
• In 1961, he formulated the concept of time-sharing of computers, which had a transformative impact on the industry. This also led to the development of the Internet and cloud computing.
• A few years later, he founded Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
• In 1969, he wrote a paper called “Computer-Controlled Cars,” in which he described how a person could enter directions with a keyboard and a television camera would navigate the vehicle.
• He won the Turing Award in 1971. This prize is considered the Nobel Prize for Computer Science.

In a speech in 2006, McCarthy noted that he was too optimistic about the progress of strong AI. According to him, “we humans are not very good at identifying the heuristics we ourselves use.”⁶