Artificial intelligence has become a part of our day-to-day life. And now it is difficult to comprehend a life without it. Over the years, the technology industry has seen a wide variety of innovations. But the introduction of AI has reduced the burden of human labor and perhaps will wipe humans from their jobs soon.
The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was first coined by a cognitive scientist. According to the researchers, in the next 45 years, there is a 50% probability that AI will be outperforming humans in all the given tasks and will automate all human jobs in 120 years. With the hype around the use of artificial intelligence, let’s travel in the past to know its origin.
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John McCarthy – The Father Of Artificial Intelligence
John McCarthy, a computer science genius is known to be the father of Artificial intelligence. For his contributions to the field of computer and technology, is known to be the successor of the father of modern computer science, Alan Turing. McCarthy was a math prodigy who taught himself college-level math by borrowing textbooks from Caltech students before joining the college. John McCarthy was an extraordinary mind with exceptional learning capabilities.
The idea to create machines that could think like humans took birth in McCarthy’s mind while he attended a symposium on Cerebral Mechanisms in Behaviour. He strongly believed that it was possible to invent machines that could embody the problem-solving nature and abstract thinking of human brains. And then it was in 1956 that he coined the term Artificial Intelligence during his formal proposal for the Dartmouth Conference.The computer prodigy is known as the father of Artificial intelligence for two reasons – one he pioneered the field of AI turning it into a new area of research and secondly continued to provide evidence for its development for almost half a century.
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John McCarthy’s Achievements
As we know John McCarthy coined the term Artificial Intelligence and laid down the roadmap for the field of study. The computer genius’s next breakthrough came when he proposed Advice Taker in his research paper ‘Programs with Common Sense’ in 1958. Advice Taker is the first step towards the concept of using logical reasoning to enhance artificial intelligence. During the same time, McCarthy also developed a new programming language called ‘LISP’, which is still used in the field of artificial intelligence.
John McCarthy also invented something called garbage collection which is a method for solving problems in the programming language LISP around 1959. This method attempted to claim memory that was occupied by objects and was not being used by the program. This invention made way to further streamlined manual memory management in LISP.Later on, John McCarthy became a distinguished member of the ACM Ad Hoc Committee on ‘Languages at the International Federation for Information Processing'(IFIP). In 1971 he was awarded the Turning Award by the Association for Computing Machinery. He was posthumously awarded the title of Standford Engineering hero in 2012. At the age of 85, the inventor, John McCarthy who dominated the field of Artificial intelligence for almost five decades, passed away on October 24, 2011.
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