John McCarthy has died

This is a great tribute:

John McCarthy died four days ago. He was 84. His obit in the “New York Times” made specific reference to his generally attributed parenthood of artificial intelligence.

John was my good friend and a terrible patient. For 30 years he resisted my best effort to shape up his dissolute lifestyle. He made 84, despite his derelictions. But a large reason why I recall him as a miserable patient is my fault. Every one of his visits to my office disrupted my subsequent patient schedule, because my encounters with him were so magnificently enriching that I defaulted the length of his scheduled appointment, and thereby made everybody else late.

John was probably the smartest person whom I had ever known. His early career was as a mathematician, initially at CalTech, then Princeton, then Dartmouth, eventually to MIT where he with Marvin Minsky spawned the world’s first artificial intelligence laboratory. He moved to Stanford in 1962, which was to be his subsequent academic home. Here he founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which birthed many of the techie geniuses of Silicon Valley. He invited members of the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist group, to meet at his lab. Among the early attendees were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The rest is history, as they say.

In 1941, while at Princeton he joined the Communist Party, part of his pedigree since both his parents were members. His romance with this leftist philosophy eventually faded around the Vietnam War, and he became more conservative thereafter; always the consummate optimistic humanist.

John had a special love for chess. While at Dartmouth in the 1950s, he taught his computer to play chess. Around this time, he engaged a group of Soviet scientists in an international tournament, which lasted a year. The Soviets won. This high profile application was eventually expanded to the PR-rich world, where chess masters and Big Blue (IBM) contested. This exposed the world’s attention on the issue of whether the human brain had found its match or maybe even its master.

En route, John’s fascinating life placed him in contact with legends. Alan Turing, Robert Oppenheimer, and other members of the atom bomb group, the big hitters at the Santa Fe Institute, and Nobel laureates were on his phone regularly. I never could figure out how John managed to fit his huge brain inside his average-size skull. His intellect was vast with prodigious memory storage. His awesome brainpower often would penetrate into deep philosophic meanderings that I treasured so much.

We spent endless hours looking into the free will / determinism terrain. But, John’s intellect extended far beyond his own field of science science into history, politics, astronomy, and philosophy. He entertained himself with science-fiction rambles. Each encounter with him left me enriched in a major way. His extraordinary intellect sometimes obscured the pixie within. Often after a sudden childish grin emerged, I wondered whether indeed he might be a leprechaun.