Pamela McCorduck, Historian of Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 80

Pamela McCorduck, whose encounters with eminent computer scientists in the 1960s and '70s led her to write a groundbreaking history of artificial intelligence over the field's first 20 years, died on Oct. 18 at her home in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 80. The New York Times reports: Ms. McCorduck was an English major who first ventured into the evolving world of artificial intelligence in 1960 as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, where she helped edit an influential book of academic papers about A.I. with Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman, two of the field's pioneering computer scientists. Her next leap into A.I. was an immersive one at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where in the 1970s she taught English. Her husband, Joseph Traub, was head of the computer science department there, which included artificial intelligence luminaries like Herbert Simon, Allen Newell and Raj Reddy. "She was dumped into this saturated milieu of the great and greatest in A.I. at Carnegie Mellon -- some of the same people whose papers she'd helped us assemble -- and decided to write a history of the field," Professor Feigenbaum said in a phone interview. The result was "Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry Into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence" (1979), a chronicle of past attempts to mechanize thought. She also wrote about the founders of a new science who had conceived of expert systems, speech understanding, robotics, general problem-solving and game-playing machines, beginning in the mid-1950s. Their work was considered to be the first of its kind in this area. Artificial intelligence, she wrote, "has pervaded Western intellectual history, a dream in urgent need of being realized. Work toward that end has been a splendid effort, the variety of its forms as wondrous as anything humans have conceived, its practitioners as lively a group of poets, dreamers, holy men, rascals and eccentrics as one could hope to find -- not a dullard among them." Ms. McCorduck's "powers of observation" and "conversational style" raised her book above others that in the years since have attempted to explain artificial intelligence to a broad audience, Philip Mirowski wrote in AI Magazine in a review of the 25th-anniversary edition of "Machines Who Think," which included a long addendum updating A.I.'s history through 2004.

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