John McCarthy -- Father of AI and Lisp -- Dies at 84

When IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer won its famous chess rematch with then world champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997, the victory was hailed far and wide as a triumph of artificial intelligence. But John McCarthy – the man who coined the term and pioneered the field of AI research – didn't see it that way. As far back as the mid-60s, chess was called the "Drosophila of artificial intelligence" – a reference to the fruit flies biologists used to uncover the secrets of genetics – and McCarthy believed his successors in AI research had taken the analogy too far. "Computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila," McCarthy wrote following Deep Blue's win. "We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies."