On October 5 died on Apple cofounder Steve Jobs , on 9 October there to mourn the death of Dennis Ritchie , creator of Unix and C language Today the world mourns the departure of another pioneer of the technology, John McCarthy , considered the father of modern artificial intelligence.
McCarthy, known familiarly by industry peers as "Uncle" died the night of October 23 to 84 years, said his daughter first.
In 1956 he was the first time spoke of 'artificial intelligence', a concept that referred to machines that had the ability to solve problems after making a preliminary assessment. These processes, although it is artificial, somewhat reminiscent of the operation of the human mind. McCarthy also defended the idea that AI should be interactive.
PhD in mathematics, McCarthy was also the inventor of Lisp , a programming language created to design intelligent computers that was widely used by early hackers .
He also participated in the first game of chess 'computational' between U.S. scientists and the Soviet Union.
McCarthy won the Turing Award from ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) in 1972 and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1991.