The Founding Fathers of AI: A Hilarious Peek into the Past
Once upon a time, in the not-so-distant past of the 20th century, a band of brilliant minds embarked on a quest to bestow upon machines the gift of intelligence. These were no ordinary men; they were the legendary Founding Fathers of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and their story is one for the ages—or at least for a chuckle or two. Let's start with John McCarthy, the man who not only coined the term "artificial intelligence" but also invented Lisp, the programming language that sounds like a speech impediment. McCarthy was a visionary who saw computers not just as fancy calculators but as potential thinkers. He was so dedicated to his work that he even invented garbage collection—not the kind where you take out the trash, but the kind that cleans up memory in computer systems. One could say he was the Marie Kondo of computer science, making sure everything sparked joy in the RAM. Then there was Marvin Minsky, the man with a name so catchy it sounds like a character