[ih] A bit more re John McCarthy

[Leonard Kleinrock]

Back to the early history involving the brilliance of John McCarthy:  For example, it is not widely known that in 1958/59 John McCarthy and Claude Shannon began working on a limited chess playing program.  McCarthy engaged a graduate student named Paul Abrahams and they took on the task of generating all legal moves from any given chess position. Shannon hired me to work with him and it was our job to generate strategies for the middle game.  In that role, among other strategies, we studied a book by Fred Reinfeld “1001 brilliant chess sacrifices and combinations” where each page showed a middle game position for which there was a brilliant move or a sequence of moves and the challenge was to find it. We went to the answers in the back of the book and gathered statistics on such data as “what is the most common first move of  brilliant sequence?“. (the answer is, unsurprisingly “check“!). Using such data, we generated a fairly interesting program to play portions of the middle game of chess. Shortly thereafter, Alan Kotok, Elwyn Berlekamp and other MIT students used some of these ideas which led to the MIT chess playing program. 
As another example, we all remember that McCarthy created LISP (and the same Paul Abrahams was again involved) and McCarthy also introduced some essential ideas of time sharing. 
Between John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky the field of AI had its early beginnings. 
Len
Sent from my iPhone


> On Jun 24, 2026, at 5:36 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> On 25-Jun-26 10:22, Sivan via Internet-history wrote:
>> Dear Jack Haverty,
>> Your question "For example, when there are problems in today's Internet,
>> are AI techniques and tools used to diagnose and repair them?   What's the
>> History of such things?" is immensely interesting. Concerns about A.I.
>> momentarily set aside, are there initiatives underway to positively use
>> A.I. tools to "diagnose and repair" problems in the Internet? For example,
>> using A.I. to scan for malware, bots, phishing and other forms of technical
>> and non-technical Abuse? Or using A.I. to scan and detect barriers to
>> network protocols such as vpns? Or even using A.I. to scan and detect
>> non-human content and other forms of Abuse?
> 
> I can't imagine that the answer to any of those questions is "No".
> I wouldn't have said that a year ago, but progress is very fast.
> 
> Of course, operators will see this as a competitive advantage and may
> choose not to publicise such AI deployments. But there is a lot of
> work in progress on agent-to-agent communication.
> 
> If this is history, it's history in progress.
> 
> Regards/Ngā mihi
>   Brian Carpenter
> 
>>  Sivasubramanian Muthusamy
>> sender
>>> On Tue, 23 Jun, 2026, 01:20 Jack Haverty via Internet-history, <
>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>> With AI now in the news all the time, I've been wondering about the
>>> history of AI in The Internet, i.e., how AI technology has been used
>>> within the Internet over the years, rather than just a service which
>>> people can access over The Internet.   Personally I only know of a few
>>> such uses of AI in a communications role, quite a while ago.  But maybe
>>> others remember more...?
>>> In the mid-1970s, I was involved in an AI project at MIT in Licklider's
>>> group, sponsored by ARPA.   It wasn't really part of the ARPANET but it
>>> did relate to communications.   The project involved using AI techniques
>>> of that era, then called "expert systems", to have computers decode
>>> hand-sent Morse radio transmissions.   The Intelligence Community was
>>> apparently quite interested in this problem at that time, and the
>>> project ran for several years and was deemed a success.
>>> FYI, see chapter 22 of https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA239925 for
>>> info on that AI project.  Personally, I think of that 1990 report as an
>>> enumeration of "ARPA's Greatest Hits".   There are six projects listed
>>> from the Information Processing Techniques Office of ARPA (IPTO, where
>>> all the networking and computer projects happened).  Another project of
>>> those six IPTO successes is The ARPANET, described in Chapter 20.   The
>>> Internet was probably still too immature to be included at the time .
>>> Similarly, while I was at BBN in the 1980s there were tools developed to
>>> visualize activity in the ARPANET, and do tasks involved in network
>>> design - figuring out where new lines were needed, reconfiguring the
>>> topology of the ARPANET to address changes in traffic patterns, and
>>> other such analyses.  I'm not sure those projects would be recognized as
>>> "AI" today, but they were widely used to manage a variety of networks
>>> such as the ARPANET and DDN. The idea was to use computers to augment
>>> people skills, as it is in today's AI as well.
>>> Bob Kahn and I had a discussion at some point in late 1982 about AI and
>>> networks in ARPA's world.   Bob was aware of the ARPA-sponsored project
>>> done at MIT in the mid 1970s which used AI "expert system" techniques to
>>> decode Morse code.   We mused that a similar expert system approach
>>> could be used to manage networks, especially the emerging Internet which
>>> was much more complex than the ARPANET and had few tools available for
>>> operations and management.
>>> The concept was to use the plentiful supply of BBN engineers who had
>>> been debugging Internet crises for several years as the "experts",
>>> observing how they worked, and translating what they did into software
>>> to do tasks "automatically".   That started the "Automated Network
>>> Management" (ANM) project as a new research task at BBN.   I wrote the
>>> proposal to ARPA and waited for the contract to be signed.  But when BBN
>>> reorganized in July 1983 the ANM contract and I went separate ways so I
>>> never got to work on ANM and I don't think there was enough detail in
>>> the proposal to convey the concept onwards to the new project team.
>>> It strikes me that the real driver of AI today has evolved only partly
>>> from advances in algorithms such as LLMs.  I think another major factor
>>> has been the massive drop in computing costs over the last
>>> half-century.  AI systems, such as that Morse Code project, were
>>> affordable only by well-funded parts of government in the 1970s,
>>> requiring millions of dollars/pounds/rubles/yen/lira to field a system
>>> that provided minimal capability.  Today, the system that cost millions
>>> in the 1970s now costs pennies by comparison.
>>> Anybody else know more about the history of the use of AI *within* (not
>>> just on top of) The Internet?   For example, when there are problems in
>>> today's Internet, are AI techniques and tools used to diagnose and
>>> repair them?   What's the History of such things?
>>> /Jack Haverty
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