John McCarthy's Home Page under construction

What's new?

It occurs to me that those who have already looked at this web page might not want to slog through all of it on the chance that something newly installed might interest them. If you've looked at the page before, then look at this dated list. Dates start in 1995 July. I sometimes miss one or two.

My goal is get all my papers and many of my notes into a form reachable from this page. I have a long way to go to achieve this. Much work in progress will be included in the hope comments might improve them. Some papers have been reformatted for easier on-line reading. However, there does not yet seem to be a good format for on-line reading, and I consider all of the things I have tried here unsatisfactory.

About John McCarthy including addresses.

The Sustainability of Human Progress
For human progress and against predictions of doom. This page and its subsidiaries attempt summarize the scientific basis for technological optimism. There are also some remarks aimed at individual doomsters and doomster organizations.

Up to: Formal Reasoning Group

Preprint Server Common Sense Preprint Server, draft This is still a draft proposal.

The FTP Directory
.tex, .dvi and .ps versions of some files are available there as well as TeX and LaTeX debris

PAPERS ON PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and their Computation by Machine (Part I). This was the original paper on LISP. A postscript version.

It is copied with minor notational changes from CACM, April 1960. If you want the exact typography, look there. A few typographical changes have been made, but the notation has not been modernized. There are also some new explanatory footnotes. Part II, which never appeared, was to have had some Lisp programs for algebraic computation.

Elephant 2000 - 1992
This unpublished draft is a proposal for a new programming language, but it includes the mathematical theory of computation proposal for distinguishing input-output and accomplishment specifications, characterizes input and output statements as speech acts and allows reference to the past in programs.

PUBLISHED PAPERS ON MATHEMATICAL THEORY OF COMPUTATION

A Basis for a Mathematical Theory of Computation, first given in 1961, was published in 1963 in Computer Programming and Formal Systems, edited by P. Braffort and D. Hirschberg and published by North-Holland.

Towards a Mathematical Science of Computation, IFIPS 1962 extends the results of the previous paper.

Correctness of a Compiler for Arithmetic Expressions by John McCarthy and James Painter may have been the first proof of correctness of a compiler. Abstract syntax and Lisp-style recursive definitions kept the paper short.

[more to come]

PUBLISHED AI PAPERS


I concentrated on papers not included in my book Formalizing Common Sense, Ablex 1990, but some of the papers included in that book are now here.

@Book{McC90,
author = "John McCarthy",
title = "Formalization of common sense, papers by {J}ohn
{M}c{C}arthy edited by {V}. {L}ifschitz",
publisher = "Ablex",
year = "1990",
}

Inversion of Functions Defined by Turing Machines was included in Automata Studies edited by Claude Shannon and myself and published by Princeton University Press in 1956.

Programs with Common Sense was probably the first paper on logical AI, i.e. AI in which logic is the method of representing information in computer memory and not just the subject matter of the program. The paper was given in the Teddington Conference on the Mechanization of Thought Processes in December 1958 and printed in the proceedings of that conference.

Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence by John McCarthy and Pat Hayes was published in 1969 in Machine Intelligence 4. It is the basic paper on situation calculus.

My 1964 Stanford AI Memo A Tough Nut for Proof Procedures has aroused increased interest lately. The present version has some recent comments. It is to prove that a checkerboard with two diagonally opposite squares removed cannot be covered by dominoes that cover two adjacent squaress.

The Mutilated Checkerboard in Set Theory was presented at the QED meeting in Warsaw in 1995 July. It is a proof in set theory that I think an interactive prover for heavy duty set theory should be able to accept. It uses for a different purpose the same problem as the previous paper.

Circumscription - A Form of Nonmonotonic Reasoning was published in Artificial Intelligence in 1980.

Applications of Circumscription to Formalizing Common Sense Knowledge was first published in Artificial Intelligence in 1986.

Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines concerns what it means for a machine to have beliefs. This started the dispute about whether thermostats could be considered to have beliefs. It was published in 1979 in an obscure collection and reprinted in my 1990 book Formalizing Common Sense.

First Order Theories of Individual Concepts and Propositions was first published in Machine Intelligence 9 in 1979.

Artificial Intelligence, Logic and Formalizing Common Sense
in Philosophical Logic and Artificial Intelligence edited by Richmond Thomason (Dordrecht ; Kluwer Academic, c1989).
This contains a reasonably up-to-date (even as of 1994) point of view of logical AI. It doesn't cover what I don't know or have forgotten.

Notes on Formalizing Context
Appeared in Proceedings of IJCAI - 1993. This version has an improvement in the way lifting above-theory is treated.

Formalizing Context (Expanded Notes) is a Technical Report containing further material on context. It is joint work with Sasa Buvac.

Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy was given at Aaron Sloman's Symposium on philosophy and AI at IJCAI-95. The present version is somewhat improved.

A LOGICAL AI APPROACH TO CONTEXT responds to a request for a note on our approach to formalizing context in mathematical logic that can be compared with John Perry's situation semantics based approach to context. It will appear in a CSLI (Center for Studies in Linguistics and Information) publication.

Making Robots Conscious of their Mental States was given at Machine Intelligence 15, 1995 August in Oxford. To appear in the Proceedings of that workshop. The idea is that many tasks will require the computer programs examine their own computational structures in ways like those involved in human consciousness and indeed self-consciousness.

Some Expert Systems Need Common Sense was published in 1984. Some people are re-defining AI in such a way that common sense and therefore human level AI are precluded. They do this inadvertently (presumably) by assuming that some human limits what phenomena are to be taken into account in defining the AI system.

Coloring Maps and the Kowalski Doctrine was a 1982 Stanford report. More is known about realizing the Kempe heuristic by making a Prolog that can run in an introspective mode, and I'll put in a note about it when I get a chance.

The Little Thoughts of Thinking Machines is a popular article that appeared in Psychology Today in 1983.

Epistemological Problems of Artificial Intelligence summarized the epistemological problems I saw at that time. It was an invited talk at IJCAI-77. Many of the problems mentioned in this paper were treated later in more detail by myself and other people.

Generality in Artificial Intelligence relates to my ACM Turing Award lecture given in 1971. However, the ideas didn't jell sufficiently at that time to be written up. In 1987 ACM asked for a summary to include in a volume of Turing Award lectures. Instead I wrote this complete paper. Its actual relation to the 1971 lecture is hard to say.


Notes on AI

An Example for Natural Language Understanding and the AI Problems it Raises - 1976

Formalization of two Puzzles Involving Knowledge involves formalization of facts about knowledge including both knowing what and knowing that, how to assume and prove non-knowledge, joint knowledge and the effect of learning a fact on the set of facts then known.


OTHER COMPUTER SCIENCE

The Common Business Communication Language, published in 1975, proposes a language for inter-business inter-computer commmunication.


AI PAPERS IN PROGRESS


The date given is when the paper was last revised.

The Well-Designed Child discusses the initial knowledge of the world that makes a baby more competent than a "Cartesian baby" would be.

Partial Formalizations and the Lemmings Game 1994 Nov

Situation Calculus with Concurrent Events and Narrative - 1994

Concepts of Logical AI has a paragraph each about each of approximately 50 concepts.

From Here to Human-level AI, 1996 August, is the basis of an invited talk at KR-96 in 1996 November.

Phenomenal Data Mining concerns finding relations between data and phenomena and not just relations within the data. There isn't much AI in the paper - yet, but the idea for phenomenal data mining has somewhat of a philosophical and AI origin.

HISTORY

Links to articles of historical interest

Links to Work by Others

BOOK REVIEW links

AI needs a basic research document

EDITORIAL PROJECTS

BASIC TOPICS IN EXPERIMENTAL COMPUTER SCIENCE is a start on a report on the above topic. POLITICS
Not much here now. There will be more later.

ADVOCACY contains references to pages advocating something or other.

ESSAYS contains essays about various topics written from time to time. Some of them are supposed to be funny.

Electronic Archives

Here are some references to home pages of individuals and institutions concerned with AI. I'd be glad to have more references.

Here is a Emacs Lisp file of mathematical, physical and astronomical facts that I prepared for my own use which I am making available by request. I have called it facts.txt, so that Netscape and competitors will treat it right. Xemacs and FSF Emacs would prefer it renamed to facts.el; then they will treat it right. The emacs lisps are subsets of Common Lisp, so it can be loaded into Common Lisp and used there.

Here's a puzzle expressing my attitude towards many human problems. Look at THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA

Here is a large collection of Web sites that I have developed over time. No special recommendations, and the classification is not as accurate as you might hope.

The number of hits on this page since 1995 October 17th.


.....
jmc@cs.stanford.edu