John McCarthy Father of AI, Dies at 84

[Thorsen]

John McCarthy -- Father of AI and Lisp -- Dies at 84 | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scientist)

John McCarthy died on Monday at the age of 84, according to Stanford University, where he served on the faculty for almost four decades. In organizing the Dartmouth Summer Research Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1956, McCarthy not only added a term to the popular lexicon, he founded an entirely new area of research alongside fellow pioneers Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. In the years to come, he would go on invent LISP — one of the world’s most influential programming languages — and he played a major role in the development of time-sharing systems.

 

[Win7User512]

It's "surprising" to see these pioneers passing, even though you always know they will some day. It's just incredible when they do. The unix guy died the other day, Jobs passed, and now McCarthy.

When you stop to think he coined that term and now how important a field of computer science that artificial intelligence is, it is sad to see these guys go.

 

[Mercurial]

Its really gonna be 2012