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C00002 00002	\centerline{ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE KYOTO PRIZE 1988 LAUREATE}
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\centerline{ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE KYOTO PRIZE 1988 LAUREATE}
\centerline{ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY}
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Dr. John McCarthy is a pioneer in the research of artificial
intelligence (A.I.), which is currently one of the most
attractive fields in computer science.  Since the genesis of
A.I., he has challenged the basic problems of this field as a 
leader and is called ``the father of Artificial Intelligence''.

Dr. McCarthy entered California Institute of Technology at
the age of 16 and took an interest in A.I. research already in his
school days.  Among colleagues during the postgraduate course of
the Princeton University was Dr. Marvin Minsky, and these two
young researchers later become the two greatest authorities of
A.I.  Dr. McCarthy first studied A.I. based on automaton and
edited, a publication titled ``Automata Studies'' with Dr. Shannon.
This book had a great influence on the automaton studies in Japan
in those days.

One of Dr. McCarthy's achievements is the study of ``Common
Sense Reasoning'', in which the logic of common sense reasoning
was formalized to provide reasoning capabilities equal to that of
humans to computers.  From the study of ``Programs with Common
Sense'' in 1950's to the recent ``Circumscription'', a form of non-
monotonic reasoning, he has consistently proposed new theories
beyond the scope of the conventional inference of information
science, contributing the development of this field.

However, his most outstanding work may be creation of LISP,
a programming language for symbolic processing.  Conventional
programming languages were designed for numerical processing,
while LISP was designed based on the idea what functions are
required for effective symbolic processing.  Most of current A.I.
research use LISP, and it is indispensable for that purpose.
His concept gave a significant influence on the present
programming languages and is considered to the greatest invention
in this century in the field of computer science.

Besides, Dr. McCarthy has reported a number of theses that
established the foundation of basic computation theory for the
present software science.  In the field of computer engineering,
he proposed the basic concept of the time sharing system (TSS)
and was involved in its production.  This is highly acclaimed as
a work that opened up a way toward the development of the present
large cmputers.

In addition to these acadmmic contributions, Dr. McCarthy
started the first project of A.I. at MIT in 1958 and established
the Artificial Intelligence Lab there.  After having moved to
Stanford University, he also established the A.I. laboratory at
the University.  He was the president of the American
Association for Artificial Intelligence for 1983 - 1984 and
contributed to instruction of younger researchers and development
of the associaton.  Dr. McCarthy was awarded the 1971 A.M.
Turing Award and the first Research Excellence Award of IJCAI in
1985.

He has visited Japan several times since 1969.  During his
visits, he gave lectures at the research Institute for
Mathematical Sciences of Kyoto University and other places,
stayed at Kyoto as a co-worker, and taught many young
researchers.  He is also a Japanophile who loves Kyoto.
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