John McCarthy, born in 1927, was a pioneering figure in artificial intelligence (AI), co-founding the discipline alongside Marvin Minsky and others during the Dartmouth conference in 1956. He developed significant concepts such as the 'Advice Taker' program and the Lisp programming language, which are foundational to AI, and contributed to non-monotonic reasoning methods and early time-sharing systems. McCarthy's work had a profound impact on computer science and the development of AI technologies, highlighting his adventurous spirit in engaging with global scientific communities.

1. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ASSIGNMENT
==>What is the main contribution of John McCarthy for the establishment of
artificial intelligence as a new discipline?
*HISTORY:
John McCarthy was born September 4, 1927 in an immigrant family with an Irish
father and a Jewish mother. He
was exceptionally intelligent from
young age as he graduated from his
high school2 years early and his
application for Caltech Science
University was also accepted in
1944. He also loves maths in his
early days which help him to save
two years of his college graduation
and later he receive his B.S. in
mathematics in 1948. He was greatly inspired when he attended a lecture of famous
scientist John Von Neumann. After that he moved to Princeton Universityto receive
his Ph.D in mathematics in 1951.
He also championed in logics for mathematics in artificial intelligence.
*CONTRIBUTION IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:
John McCarthy along with Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon
together key founded artificial intelligence in 1955 and also started the famous
Dartmouth Conference in 1956 which start AI as a field.
Later in 1958 he proposed advice taker, a computer program with common sense
reasoning ability, which later formed the foundation of question answering and logic
programming.

2. He also invented Lisp programming language in 1950s which was based on lambda
calculus and was majorly used for programming in artificial intelligence.
McCarthy was also part of ACM Ad hoc Committee which later designed ALGOL
60, another programming language, and also advances that language by introducing
recursion, conditional statements and garbage collection in ALGOL.
He also helped establishing Stanford’s AI laboratory. In late 1960s John along with
his team from Stanford developed a computer program which used to play chess
board game with Soviet Union and the results were likely loosing two times and also
drew two games.
Between 1978 and 1986, McCarthy developed the circumscription method of non-
monotonic reasoning. He is also bieng credited for developing an starting forms of
time sharing systems, which later formed foundations for servers as well as cloud
computing.
In early 1980s, he started the idea of space fountains, a type of tower extendinginto
spaceand kept vertical ny the outward force of a stream of pellets propelled from
Earth along a sort of conveyer belt which retuns the pellet to Earth (payloads would
ride the conveyer belt upwards).
In one of his article entitled “Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines." he wrote,
“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."
John McCarthy was never confined to his studies, he was a gifted scientist, with a
heart of a child and also brave enough like a man to visit Soviet Union and China in
1960s and 70s when it was a challenging task to visit those countries.
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