Bill Gosper <billgosper@gmail.com> wrote:
I just learned that John McCarthy passed away in his sleep last night. I understand that no funeral is planned but expect there will be a celebration of his life sometime in the future. -Les Earnest
(Les was the AILab business manager forever.)
Indeed, a hugely bad month for giants. --rwg
Sorry to be the bringer of bad news, but John McCarthy seems to have passed.
While there don't seem to be any "official" sources, Wendy Grossman -- a friend of the McCarthy family and a journalist -- received news that Dr. McCarthy has died.
See https://twitter.com/#!/wendyg/status/128554733714669568
If what is said is true, RIP John McCarthy 1927-2011.
Regards,
Robert Smith I am very sorry to hear that John McCarthy has passed. I marvelous person. Not only able but charming, creative, and enterprising.
I was using the computer at Stanford when he was first working on getting a robot arm working and was wondering if anyone knows anything about a story I heard at that time. The story was that he and his group had finally gotten an arm working well enough to do simple functions. I recall being told the funding supporting the work came from industry and was directed to using such an arm on assembly-line manufacturing. To celebrate the occasion John had the arm serving punch at the AI department party. Here is what I remember of the story I heard: The task the arm was instructed to carry out was serving punch. You held you cup forward to a certain spot a sensing reader was aided at and the arm moved to a spot and dipped into the punch bowl and filled itself up. It then moved above your cup and poured the punch in and returned to its rest location and shut down. Everyone loved it. (I don't know what was in the punch.) After awhile, however, the dutiful arm seemed to tire of its task and altered its task in a way I understand was even more delighting to the crowd. Half way through its cycle after it filled itself up, rather thasn moving over to above your cup, it twisted back instead and poured its punch on itself. This made me suspect there was alcohol in the punch, but I never knew. I heard that John was a little upset and annoyed that it didn't perform perfectly, but, of course, this depends on how one defines "perfect". As entertainment value, as in an old Buster Keaton movie, it WAS perfect, because I heard everyone wanted to keep putting their cup forward to see it perform even more. Does anyone know about this story and whether the version I remember is true? There is another story I have about John, whom I only knew a little because we were both at the computer center at the same time. In those days the computer center, at which the "boy scouts" were always around, was a social place with the PDP running "space war" and there was a spirit of a pool hall around. It showed just how important it was as an educational environment where you work in the midst of people at all levels and a sense of common identity gave support to clever and active young beginners in the midst of some of the best who were equally at home with other busy and creative people. Up at Berkeley, where the Raphael and Julia Robinson were a major force in logic, Julia was still in the midst of her work with Hilbert's 10th problem. She suddenly got a message from John McCarthy who had just been in Russia and had heard a lecture by a young logician, Yuri Matijasevich, who had finished the solution to Hilbert's 10th problem. He had taken sketchy notes of the talk and sent a copy of the notes to Julia. She was able to figure out what he had done from his notes and was delighted. In 1969, as it happened, she gave a talk at a meeting at Stony Brook that I heard in which she had given the "latest" on the progress in solving the problem. When she found out the final step rested on a certain identity in the Fibonacci numbers, she said to her husband Raphael in a mixture of good humor and annoyance, "You knew all about those numbers. Why didn't you tell me about this?!" So John McCarthy in this case was indeed the bearer of good news.