The origin of AI (& LISP)

from "AI newsletter" Forward Future AI (2024-10-25)

🧑‍🚀 AI Whistleblower Alleges OpenAI Violated Copyright Laws

Who coined the term “artificial intelligence?”

The term "artificial intelligence" was coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956. He introduced the term during the Dartmouth Conference, a summer research project at Dartmouth College, which is considered the founding event of AI as a field of study. McCarthy is often referred to as one of the "fathers of AI" for his contributions to the field.

John McCarthy (computer scientist) - Wikipedia

John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence.^[1] He co-authored the document that coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the programming language family Lisp, significantly influenced the design of the language ALGOL, popularized time-sharing, and invented garbage collection.

In the late 1950s, McCarthy discovered that primitive recursive functions could be extended to compute with symbolic expressions, producing the Lisp programming language.^[16] That functional programming seminal paper also introduced the lambda notation borrowed from the syntax of lambda calculus in which later dialects like Scheme based its semantics. Lisp soon became the programming language of choice for AI applications after its publication in 1960.

Lisp (programming language) - Wikipedia

John McCarthy began developing Lisp in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). McCarthy published its design in a paper in Communications of the ACM in April 1960,

McCarthy's original notation used bracketed "M-expressions" that would be translated into S-expressions. As an example, the M-expression car[cons[A,B]] is equivalent to the S-expression (car (cons A B))

Lisp was first implemented by Steve Russell on an IBM 704 computer using punched cards.