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John McCarthy
Personal blog · jmc.stanford.eduaihistoryphilosophy
John McCarthy's personal blog at jmc.stanford.edu covers ai, history and philosophy. Since 2015, 52 different Hacker News readers have linked it 67 times, most often “History of Lisp (1979) [pdf]”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Professor John McCarthy's page
Most-linked posts?
- History of Lisp (1979) [pdf]16 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2017-07-09
- A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence [pdf]5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-08-01
- Progress and Its Sustainability by John McCarthy3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-09-23
- /articles/robotandbaby/robotandbaby.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-10-28
- What is Artificial Intelligence? [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-05
- History of Lisp2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-25
What Hacker News says?
No, Lisp was developed from 1958 onwards as a list processing language for the IBM 704. http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf Page 7: > The implementation of LISP began in Fall 1958. The original idea was to produce a compiler, but this was considered a major undertaking, and we needed some experimenting in order to get good conventions for subroutine linking, stack handling and erasure. Therefore, we start…
Comment linking /articles/lisp/lisp.pdf
on “Disney claims anyone using a Twitter hashtag is agreeing to their terms of use”Submitted History of Lisp (1979) [pdf] as a story · 153 points
HN discussionThere is this dual biography from 1980: John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener : from mathematics to the technologies of life and death by Steve J Heims https://archive.org/details/johnvonneumannno00heim Here is a review by John McCarthy: http://jmc.stanford.edu/artificial-intelligence/reviews/heim...
Comment linking /artificial-intelligence/reviews/heims.pdf
on “The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann”Submitted History of Lisp (1979) [pdf] as a story · 101 points
HN discussionEver heard of LISP? http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp.html > This paper concentrates on the development of the basic ideas of LISP... when the programming language was implemented and applied to problems of artificial intelligence.
Comment linking /articles/lisp.html
on “AI makes tech debt more expensive”Submitted History of Lisp (1979) [pdf] as a story · 98 points
HN discussion> But in the AI's defense, they have a point: You never specified if the towels can be dried simultaneously or not. Maybe you have to use a drying machine that can only do one at a time. This one seems to consistently work: This is the inverse of the Frame Problem, or the Qualification problem: John McCarthy's paper related to it from the 1980's http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/circumscription/circumscrip... It is s…
Comment linking /articles/circumscription/circumscription.pdf
on “Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model”Submitted John McCarthy: Challenges to Machine Learning (2007) [pdf] as a story · 62 points
HN discussionI'm pretty sure that is the first implementation of Lisp. Earlier "versions" of Lisp were hand-compiled, because it was considered too difficult to produce a compiler. Then Steve Russell realized that McCarthy's "eval" function could be implemented in assembly language (which apparently hadn't occurred to McCarthy, he considered it merely theoretical) and produced the first Lisp interpreter. Note that the manual is…
Comment linking /articles/lisp/lisp.pdf
on “For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection”Submitted John McCarthy: Reminiscences on the Theory of Time-Sharing (1983) as a story · 40 points
HN discussionI can't give you a great answer because I wasn't there, but I did find a John McCarthy paper describing its usage by way of an automatic typewriter [0] as referenced by the wiki on Lisp [1], first implemented via punchcards on the IBM 704. That would be vacuum tube logic and magnetic core memory. ~19,000 pounds, 12k flops (36bit), 18kB of RAM, 3.75-ish Megabytes of storage per 2,400 feet of mylar tape. [2] As for la…
Comment linking /articles/lisp/lisp.pdf
on “IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor”Submitted What is Common Sense (2002) [pdf] as a story · 5 points
HN discussionDoesn't the frame and qualification problem discredit the latter? FWIW, most physics professionals I know, who aren't just popular personalities are not in the scientific realism camps. They realize that all models are wrong and that some are useful. I do think that the limits of induction and deduction are often ignored in the CS world, and as abduction is only practical in local cases is also ignored. But the quan…
Comment linking /articles/circumscription/circumscription.pdf
on “What If Data Is a Bad Idea?”Submitted Happy 70th Birthday, Artificial Intelligence [pdf] as a story · 4 points
HN discussionObligatory links: Rivest's proposal, with source code: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/sexp.html McCarthy's Common Business Communication Language: http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/cbcl.html
Comment linking /articles/cbcl.html
on “Bringing the Unix philosophy to the 21st century (2019)”Submitted A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence [pdf] as a story · 4 points
HN discussionFrom the title I was sure that this would be some horrible misuse of "machine learning" to stand-in for "AI" but while Shannon himself never uses the term in the video, the title seems accurate enough. To summarise: a model mouse, named Theseus, is moved around a maze by a system of electromagnets placed under the maze and guided by an electromechanical computer (made with telephone relays). The computer is from Bel…
Comment linking /articles/elaboration.html
on “Claude Shannon Demonstrates Machine Learning (1952)”Submitted LISP – Notes on its past and future, by John McCarthy (1980) [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttp://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf " One mathematical consideration that influenced LISP was to express programs as applicative expressions built up from variables and constants using functions. I considered it important to make these expressions obey the usual mathematical laws allowing replacement of expressions by expressions giving the same value. The motive was to allow proofs of properties of progr…
Comment linking /articles/lisp/lisp.pdf
on “Show HN: A notebook-style Common Lisp environment”Submitted What is Artificial Intelligence? [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe original idea of McCarthy was to have a list processing language on the IBM 704. http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf Lisp was always as much as an idea as a real proramming language and both were developed together. Lisp was developed as a practical tool for AI research, especially for his AI research.
Comment linking /articles/lisp/lisp.pdf
on “Show HN: A notebook-style Common Lisp environment”Submitted History of Lisp as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIsn't this just seeing a slippery slope and deciding to build a terrace[1], in that the existence of a digital ID doesn't automatically lead to mandate to carry one—any more than the existence of a physical ID card does? [1] to paraphrase one many excellent John McCarthy-isms: http://jmc.stanford.edu/general/sayings.html
Comment linking /general/sayings.html
on “Digital ID, a new way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet”Submitted John McCarthy on AI and Chess (1998) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt surprised me to learn that John McCarthy never intended S-expressions to be the human-facing syntax of LISP. http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf
Comment linking /articles/lisp/lisp.pdf
on “The Future of Programming (2013) [video]”Submitted An unreasonable book (1976) [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAlthough they weren't built into the language, conditional expressions were first used in Fortran in 1957 by John McCarthy: "I invented conditional expressions in connection with a set of chess legal move routines I wrote in FORTRAN for the IBM 704 at M.I.T. during 1957-58. This program did not use list processing. The IF statement provided in FORTRAN 1 and FORTRAN 2 was very awkward to use, and it was natural to in…
Comment linking /articles/lisp/lisp.pdf
on “Fortran adds conditional expressions”Submitted Programs with Common Sense by John McCarthy (1959) [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionJohn McCarthy coined the term AI in 1955 for a research project that included NN. He then founded the MIT AI Project (later AI Lab) with one of the researchers who joined the project, Marvin Minsky, who also had created the first NN in 1951. If NNs aren't AI, what is? http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/dartmouth/dartmouth.pdf
Comment linking /articles/dartmouth/dartmouth.pdf
on “Prostate cancer includes two different evotypes”Submitted John McCarthy: History of Lisp (1979) [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
