John Clifford Shaw (February 23, 1922 – February 9, 1991) was a systems programmer at the

RAND Corporation The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financed ...

. He is a coauthor of the first

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

program, the

Logic Theorist Logic Theorist is a computer program written in 1956 by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, and Cliff Shaw. , and It was the first program deliberately engineered to perform automated reasoning and is called "the first artificial intelligence prog ...

, and was one of the developers of

General Problem Solver General Problem Solver (GPS) is a computer program created in 1959 by Herbert A. Simon, J. C. Shaw, and Allen Newell (RAND Corporation) intended to work as a universal problem solver machine. In contrast to the former Logic Theorist project, the GP ...

(universal problem

solver A solver is a piece of mathematical software, possibly in the form of a stand-alone computer program or as a software library, that 'solves' a mathematical problem. A solver takes problem descriptions in some sort of generic form and calculates t ...

machine) and

Information Processing Language Information Processing Language (IPL) is a programming language created by Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert A. Simon at RAND Corporation and the Carnegie Institute of Technology about 1956. Newell had the job of language specifier-applicatio ...

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

of the 1950s). It is considered the true "father" of the

JOSS Joss may refer to: * Joss (name), including a list of people with the name * JOSS, a time-sharing programming language * Joss (Chinese statue), a religious object * Joss JP1, an Australian-built supercar * Joss paper, a type of burnt offering * J ...

language. One of the most significant events that occurred in the programming was the development of the concept of list processing by

Allen Newell Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department ...

Herbert A. Simon Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist, with a Ph.D. in political science, whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary ...

and Cliff Shaw during the development of the language IPL-V. He invented the

linked list In computer science, a linked list is a linear collection of data elements whose order is not given by their physical placement in memory. Instead, each element points to the next. It is a data structure consisting of a collection of nodes whic ...

, which remains fundamental in many strands of modern computing technology.

References

External links

*Simon, Herbert A
Allen Newell
- a referenced biography of Newell and Shaw at the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

. * People in information technology History of artificial intelligence Carnegie Mellon University faculty Place of birth missing 1922 births 1991 deaths {{compu-bio-stub