John McCarthy helped found the study of artificial intelligence, named the discipline and spent decades making computers understand things that for humans are common sense. He devised the programming language Lisp, a favored tool of software developers for more than a half-century.
Mr. McCarthy, who died Monday at age 84, brought a mathematician's rigor to computing. "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense," he wrote in a 1995 paper.
Collaborating with other pioneers of early computing, Mr. McCarthy worked on one of the first chess-playing programs with British researcher Alan Turing and edited an early volume of papers on artificial intelligence with Claude Shannon, the father of information theory .... Read more at http://online.wsj.com
