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Artificial Intelligence guru John McCarthy dies


John McCarthy, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and the creator of the Lisp programming language, has died at age 84, the Stanford School of Engineering announced. In a post on its Twitter account, the Stanford School of Engineering "sadly" confirmed McCarthy's passing. "Sadly, we have confirmed that John McCarthy passed away Oct. 23," it said. McCarthy is known for Lisp, a program considered the language of choice for AI. He is also credited with coining the term "artificial intelligence." An article on tech site CNET said McCarthy had described AI in 1956 as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." CNET said McCarthy invented Lisp in 1958 while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and published its design in the 1960 paper Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I. Lisp, one of the oldest high-level programming languages second only to Fortran, is still in use today. McCarthy received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of AI. He was born in Boston on September 4, 1927 to an Irish immigrant father and a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant mother. McCarthy showed an early aptitude for mathematics and he taught himself mathematics by studying the textbooks used at the nearby California Institute of Technology (Caltech). — TJD, GMA News