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\F2\CARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY
\CCOMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
\CSTANFORD UNIVERSITY
\CSTANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305
\F0




							September 24, 1973

Mr. Richard Last
The Daily Telegraph
135 Fleet Street
E.C. 4
London, England



Dear Mr. Last:

\J	As the "puckish" American professor you refer to in your column
on the artificial intelligence debate, I regret to inform you that you
didn't only "find it difficult to know where one concept began and the
other ended".  You misunderstood the point of my statement about the
origin of the term "artificial intelligence".  The reason for the term,
as I stated and as BBC transmitted, was for its effect on scientists
not for its effect on a funding agency.  Namely, when we previously used
the term "Automata Studies" for a proposed collection of articles, we
got many papers of purely mathematical interest which didn't contribute
to the goal of making intelligent machines.  This was the reason for the
term which some people criticized as unnecessarily flashy.\.


							Sincerely yours,



							John McCarthy
							Professor of Computer Science
							Director, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory