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John McCarthy

1927–2011 · American

Organized the 1956 Dartmouth conference and invented the dominant AI programming language of the following decades.

Contribution: Coined the name Artificial Intelligence and co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth conference that launched the field.
Invented Lisp, the dominant language for symbolic AI for decades.
Pushed for machines that could reason with formal knowledge, not only calculate numbers.
Key observations: Naming a field focuses attention, funding, and shared problems.
A language shaped for lists and recursion makes symbolic reasoning easier to write.
Early AI optimism assumed intelligence was mostly searchable rules and representations.
Conclusions: "AI" is a research program with many methods — not one product.
Symbolic approaches (rules, logic, knowledge graphs) still matter beside learning from data.
When you hear Dartmouth or Lisp in history, you are hearing the birth certificate of the field's name.

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