John McCarthy receives the 1971 ACM Turing Award

Background

John McCarthy was born on September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts^[1]. He is the person who gave the field now called artificial intelligence its name: at a 1956 conference at Dartmouth College he introduced the term^[1]. Two years later he moved to MIT, where he and Marvin Minsky formed the Artificial Intelligence Project there^[1]. At MIT he also created the LISP (LISt Processor) language, a programming language built around the manipulation of lists and symbolic expressions rather than only numbers; it became an important tool in artificial intelligence research and is still widely used^[1].

What happened

In 1971 the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) listed John McCarthy as the recipient of the A.M. Turing Award^[1]. The citation noted his lecture "The Present State of Research on Artificial Intelligence" as covering the area in which he achieved considerable recognition^[1]. In other words, the honour was tied to his role in surveying and defining the research area itself, not to a single program or machine.

Key details

By the time the award was announced, McCarthy had already settled into the institutional home he would keep for the rest of his career. He was Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University from 1965, and he served as Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1966 to 1980^[1]. Those two positions placed him at the head of one of the places where the new field was being organised: a university department teaching the subject and a laboratory built for the work.

McCarthy died on October 24, 2011, in Stanford, California^[1].

Why it matters

A Turing Award is a marker of how a discipline sees its own history, and the 1971 award recognised work that was institutional as much as technical: giving a research area its name, building a shared project for it, and supplying a language in which its programs could be written. LISP outlasted the machines it was first written for and has remained in use long after the award^[1]. McCarthy's later honours include the Kyoto Prize in 1988 and the National Medal of Science in 1990^[1], but the 1971 Turing Award is the point at which the field he had named and equipped was formally acknowledged through him.