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John McCarthy is born on September 4, 1927 in Boston, Massachusetts to John Parker McCarthy and Ida Glatt. -
After graduating from high school early, McCarthy enrolls as a mathematics undergrad at Caltech in 1944. He skips the first two years of math courses after teaching himself calculus in high school. -
McCarthy serves in the U.S. Army. He was allegedly suspended after not attending his PE classes. Upon returning from service, McCarthy graduates from Caltech with a degree in Mathematics in 1948. -
In September 1948 while a graduate student at Caltech, McCarthy attends the Hixon Symposium on Cerebral Mechanisms on Behavior. It is here that McCarthy finds his lifelong passion of developing intelligent machines. -
In 1951 John McCarthy earns his Ph.D. at Princeton under the supervision of Solomon Lefschetz. Specifically focusing on differential equations, McCarthy continued his work on intelligent machines. -
In 1951, McCarthy met Marvin Minsky with whom he would work with on their shared interest in intelligent machines. -
In 1955, McCarthy moves to Dartmouth College after spending a few years as an assistant mathematics professor at Stanford. While at Dartmouth, McCarthy first attempted to program a computer and is invited to spend the summer at IBM with their head of Information Research. -
McCarthy along with Rochester, Minsky, and Claude Shannon hold the Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence at Dartmouth in the summer of 1956. This workshop marks the start of work in the field of artificial intelligence. -
At a 1958 conference in England, McCarthy gives a paper titled, "Programs with Commonsense". Also knows as the Advice Taker Paper, this paper proposes a system that could be given statements and the system would be able to reason with the statements. This paper is responsible for the field of knowledge representation. -
In 1958 after spending the summer at IBM, McCarthy would create the LISP (list processor) programming language at MIT. McCarthy's LISP supported recursion, dynamic storage, and could treat other LISP programs as data. -
In 1959, McCarthy creates "garbage collection". Garbage collection frees up RAM by removing code that goes unused by other programs. The garbage collection technique is still used in programming languages today. https://youtube.com/shorts/7IrnAqbcUsk?si=ySxBIiJTY9hOO98d -
Between 1959 and 1962, McCarthy advises a group of MIT students who create a chess playing program. Based on earlier programs written by him, this new program utilizes a method McCarthy created called the alpha-beta procedure that helps to speed up search.
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In 1962, McCarthy moves to Stanford to be a professor in their Mathematics Department's Computer Sciences Division. -
McCarthy's projects and work in AI lead to the creation of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. -
McCarthy would "manage" SAIL for 37 years until his retirement in 2000. During his tenure, the lab was responsible for advancements in computer graphical interfaces, robotics, and was one of the first nodes on ARPAnet.
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McCarthy further refines his chess program that he started while at MIT. Using a telegraph, he uses his program to challenge the Moscow Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics. The Russians won. -
In 1965, McCarthy becomes an inaugural member of Stanford's Department of Computer Sciences. While here, McCarthy starts on a new AI project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). He also worked on the development of "Thor", the first display-based timesharing system. -
SAIL, under the management of McCarthy, would become one of the first computer facilities to put display terminals on everybody's desks. These terminals had access to laboratory video cameras and live television. McCarthy would presented a paper on "The Home Information Terminal", which was an idea of a network of home based computers. https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/hoter2.pdf -
In 1971, McCarthy is awarded the Association for Computing Machinery Turing Award for his contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvRiL3_nduA