Computer pioneer McCarthy dies

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 25 (UPI) -- John McCarthy, a U.S. computer pioneer who coined the term "artificial intelligence," has died at 84, Stanford University announced.

McCarthy, who was a member of the Stanford faculty for almost four decades, died Monday night, The Washington Post reported.

McCarthy was the inventor of the Lisp programming language, widely used for artificial intelligence applications.

McCarthy's Web site, where he published his Stanford lectures, thoughts on the future of robots and science fiction writing, has a large following, many of whom posted tributes to him Tuesday.

His most widely read work is his proposal for artificial intelligence, presented at Dartmouth in 1955, in which he wrote that "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it."

In 1988 McCarthy was awarded the Kyoto Prize, considered the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for lifetime contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence.