John McCarthy has passed away

[bhandelman]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/24 ... rthy_dies/

Last night, John McCarthy passed away at the age of 84. While best known for his work in developing the LISP programming language and the understanding of AI, he was also one of the early pioneers of computer chess. While I'm sure there are programmers on here better suited to explain his impact on the field, his chess program, known as Kotok-McCarthy, was considered the first computer chess program to play chess convincingly. He also began the use of alpha-beta pruning in relation to choosing moves, which is still used to this day.

Here is a video from 2005 of a panel he was on discussing the early history of computer chess:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 0148765375