Lecture in Remembrance of John McCarthy

John McCarthy, famous for his role in the development of time-sharing, for inventing the computer language LISP, for his foundational work in theory of computation, and for his founding of the fields of artificial intelligence and knowledge representation, was concerned for much of his career with what he termed drosophilae: small challenge problems that highlighted characteristic aspects of intelligent problem solving, and that could be constructed, researched, and hopefully solved rapidly, thus facilitating progress towards human-level intelligence. Although we tend to think of such drosophilae as toy problems, McCarthy’s challenge problems were oen quite complex, nuanced, and far reaching. is talk analyzes McCarthy’s myriad contributions to artificial intelligence and knowledge representation through the set of drosophilae that he proposed, ranging from the airport example in “Programs with Common Sense," where he first argued for the need for an explicit representation of knowledge in order to endow computers with the ability to perform common-sense reasoning, to his many later puzzles involving knowledge and self-awareness. I show how these challenge problems reflect McCarthy’s strengths as both theoretician and engineer, and explore how these drosophilae shaped his research.