This is an attempt to analyze attitudes and arguments brought forth by questions like "Can machines think?" and "Can machines exhibit intelligence?" Its purpose is to improve the climate which surrounds research in the field of machine or artificial intelligence. Its goal is not to convince those who answer the above questions negatively that they are wrong (although an attempt will be made to refute some of the negative arguments) but that they should be tolerant of research investigating these questions. The negative attitudes existent today tend to inhibit such research.Reprinted in Feigenbaum & Feldman, Computers and Thought (1963).Also in Datamation 9(3), March 1963, pp.34-38.Symposium on Bionics, Rand Technical Report 60 600, pp. 13-19

Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, Vol 7, pp. 102-128

This is the first clear call for the separation of knowledge and inference procedure in AI. In this paper McCarthy advocates using predicate logic as a declarative representation of knowledge and first-order logic as the inference procedure.Additional notes on this landmark paper at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcc59/mcc59.html.Bar-Hilel's comments in the discussion section from the conference are also interesting:"PROF. Y. BAR-HILLEL: Dr. McCarthy's paper belongs in the Journal of Half-Baked Ideas, the creation of which was recently proposed by Dr. I. J. Good. Dr. McCarthy will probably be the first to admit this. Before he goes on to bake his ideas fully, it might be well to give him some advice and raise some objections. He himself mentions some possible objections, but I do not think that he treats them with the full consideration they deserve; there are others he does not mention.For lack of time, I shall not go into the first part of his paper, although I think that it contains a lot of highly unclear philosophical, or pseudo-philosophical assumptions. I shall rather spend my time in commenting on the example he works out in his paper at some length. Before I start, let me voice my protest against the general assumption of Dr. McCarthy -- slightly caricatured -- that a machine, if only its program is specified with a sufficient degree of carelessness, will be able to carry out satisfactory even rather difficult tasks."In Proceedings of the Symposium on the Mechanization of Thought Processes, National Physical Laboratory 1:77-84

'The modern science of switching theory began

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This work is partly included in a project sponsored by Statens tekniska forskningsråd (Sweden). Berg, and Mr Voghera for reading the manuscript and making valuable suggestions (see also n. 11). Use the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues.

MIT Press.

Research report RC 294, IBM, Yorktown Heights, New York

In Yovitts, M. and Cameron, S. (eds.) Self-organizing Systems. New York: Pergamon