Chitchat with the father of Artificial Intelligence

Remembering John McCarthy

I happened to personally meet one of the widely recognized fathers of AI, John McCarthy –the other father was Marvin Minsky (please spare me of any joke about AI having two fathers). As a matter of fact, I was academically more related to Marvin Minsky, because my Thesis director, A. Guzman, was tutored by Minsky at MIT for his Thesis, so automatically I am a grandson (academically) of the great Marvin Minsky.

But let’s get back to John McCarthy. Everyone in the AI field knows that he coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”, how about that? He also developed the Lisp programming language, which was very influential to AI during the 70s and 80s. He wasn’t yet 50 years old when he received the prestigious Turing Award, a lifetime recognition, a kind of Nobel prize for Computer Scientists.

I met him in 2005 because he was kind enough to come from Stanford to Monterrey (Mexico) to give a keynote conference. I was just the workshops chair of the event.

If you’ve been to Monterrey, you know that beef tacos and beer are a must-have for a meal here. Nothing to do with the Taco Bell’s hardshell “tacos”, we’re talking about the real thing: authentic maize tortilla with “arrachera”, “cachete”, you name it. And McCarthy faced the authentic “Regio” taco with bravery, but above all, in a seat exactly next to mine! I really couldn’t let go of this once-in-a-lifetime chance to talk to such a living (then) legend, so there I went with questions.

But I didn’t ask him questions about how he designed the garbage collection system of the Lisp interpreter. No, that’s stuff you can get in written sources. I wanted to get a glimpse of the real John McCarthy.

We ended up talking about science fiction. Of course, John was a fan of Asimov, but what most surprised me was that he used himself to write short SciFi stories. Eagerly I asked him to share with me some of them. We exchanged business cards (the image above is the scanned, actual card he gave to me), and after ending the meal with some “Glorias” (the goat-milk regional dessert), we shook hands.

Sadly, I never received the aforementioned short SciFi stories. Nor I saw him again. So, when in 2011 he passed away, I knew for sure I’d never read his unpublished short stories.

Seen in retrospective, I think that he must have had thousands of such random encounters with fellow, much less known, computer scientists. But to me, that presentation card is a little treasure.