John McCarthy obituary

In 1955 the computer scientist John McCarthy, who has died aged 84, coined the term artificial intelligence, or AI. His pioneering work in AI – which he defined as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines" – included organising the first Dartmouth conference on artificial intelligence, and developing the programming language Lisp in 1958. This was the second high-level language, after Fortran, and was based on the radical idea of computing using symbolic expressions rather than numbers. It helped spawn a whole AI industry. McCarthy was also the first to propose a time-sharing model of computing.