John McCarthy, Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 84

"In the early 1970s, he presented a paper in France on buying and selling by computer, what is now called electronic commerce," said Whitfield Diffie, an Internet security expert who worked as a researcher for Dr. McCarthy at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. And in the study of artificial intelligence, "no one is more influential than John," Mr. Diffie said. While teaching mathematics at Dartmouth in 1956, Dr. McCarthy was the principal organizer of the first Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The idea of simulating human intelligence had been discussed for decades, but the term "artificial intelligence" -- originally used to help raise funds to support the conference -- stuck. In 1958, Dr. McCarthy moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, with Marvin Minsky, he founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.