John McCarthy, creator of
Lisp and one of the founders of the field of
artificial intelligence, has died.
He changed the world more than
Steve Jobs ... but in a far subtler way, by laying the foundation for programs like Apple's
Siri through his artificial intelligence work, or more broadly by laying the foundation for much of modern computing through innovations like the
IF-THEN-ELSE formalism.
It's important not to overstate the impact of great men like John and Steve; artificial intelligence pioneers like
Marvin Minsky would have pushed us forward without John, and companies like Xerox and Microsoft would have pushed us forward without Steve. But we're certainly better off, and farther along, with their contributions.
I have only three stories to tell about John McCarthy. The third story is that I last saw him at a conference at IBM, in a mobile scooter and not looking very well. Traveling backwards in time, the second story is that I spoke with one of his former graduate students, who saw a John McCarthy poster in my office, and told me John's illness had progressed to the point where he basically couldn't program any more and that he was feeling very sad about it.
But what I want to remember is my first encounter with John ... it's been a decade and a half, so my memory's fuzzy, but I recall it was at
AAAI-97 in
Providence, Rhode Island. I'd arrived at the conference in a terrible snafu and had woken up a friend at 4 in the morning because I had no place to stay. I wandered the city looking for
H.P. Lovecraft landmarks and had trouble finding them, though I did see a house some think inspired
Dreams in the Witch House.
But near the end, at a dinner for AI folks, I want to say at
Waterplace Park but I could be misremembering, I bumped in to John McCarthy. He was holding court at the end of the table, and as the evening progressed I ended up following him and a few friends to a bar, where we hung out for an evening.
And there, the grand old man of artificial intelligence, still at the height of his powers, regaled the wet-behind-the-ears graduate student from Atlanta with tales of his grand speculative ideas, beyond that of any science fiction writer, to accelerate galaxies to the speed of light to save shining stars from the heat death of the universe.
We'll miss you, John.
-Anthony
Image stolen shamelessly from
Zach Beane's blog. The title of this post is taken from the
Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual, and is the original, pre-implementation Lisp
M-expression notation for code to remove an item from a list.
Shortly after a study from a former climate skeptic seemed to show that global warming is indeed happening, anti-climate skeptics are now accusing him of "hiding the truth" because the globe hasn't warmed in the last 10 years.
Ok, let's grant that, for sake of argument. I for one believe it. But climate is defined as the weather averaged over 30 years. So even if the temperature hasn't risen for 13 years, as they suggest, that means that it has risen for 17 out of the last 30 - and that the temperature is still rising.
Wait another decade and then you've got a case to make that global warming has stopped. If the skeptics are right, as they haven't been about almost anything for the past century or so, then we can throw a party. If they're wrong ... well, waiting another ten years makes fixing the problem much harder.
Understand: climate skeptics are just stalling in the hope the the problem will just go away. Personally, I wait in joyful hope for the Resurrection --- but when dealing with temporal problems, I pray for God's good favor, then get to work.
Why don't we all try being real about what our problems are and working hard to fix them, for a change?
-the Centaur 
