Artificial intelligence – death of leader in the field

Artificial intelligence – death of leader in the field

Professor Donald Michie and his former wife Dame Anne McLaren, distinguished scientists in separate fields, died together in a car accident. Donald Michie was 83.

Cyberneticians and all who are involved in the field of artificial intelligence recognise Dr Michie as a pioneer and leader who continued actively in research until his untimely death. An obituary in the UKs GuardianNewspaper (Muggleton, 2007) described the contributions he made as:

• ... of crucial international significance in three distinct fields of endeavour. During the second world war, he developed code-breaking techniques which led to effective automatic deciphering of German high-level ciphers. In the 1950s, he worked with Anne on pioneering techniques which were fundamental in the development of in vitro fertilisation. Donald subsequently became one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, an area to which he devoted the remainder of his academic career.

Dr Michie, who was born in Rangoon, was recruited in 1943 to Bletchley Park(UK) and assigned to a section working on solving the German high-level teleprinter cipher code-named Fish. Muggleton writes that:

• Owing to recent declassification, it is now clear how profoundly important Donald's wartime research was. In April 1944 he invented a technique for using the Colossus computer, developed at Bletchley, to automatically decode the secondary wheel of the Lorentz machine, which the Germans used for encoding Fish.The innovation, tested by Donald and Jack Good, endowed the machine with a degree of general-purpose programmability and led to a radical last-minute enhancement in the construction of Colossus II. The results were dramatic. Texts which previously had taken days to decipher could now be completed in hours, allowing repeated effective interception of enemy attacks.

  It was at this time that Dr Michie met Alan Turing and discussed with him the possibility of building computer programs that would display intelligence. At the end of World War II he took up an open scholarship he had been awarded in 1942. This was to read classics at Balliol College. His wartime service had,however changed his earlier interest from classics to science.

  In 1949, he took his MA in human anatomy and physiology and then a DPhil. His interest in genetics resulted in a series of genetics studies to be published in the journal Nature.

  In the 1960s, he concentrated on developing some of the ideas he had discussed in wartime with Turing, in particular “whether computers could be programmed to learn from experience”.

  He developed a noughts-and-crosses machine called Menace for which he developed a general-purpose learning algorithm called Boxes, with no computers available at that time he hand-simulated the Boxes algorithm using a device made from an assembly of matchboxes. This heralded his work at Edinburgh University where he soon set up a small artificial intelligence research unit, and an experimental programming unit in 1965 with the support of Sir Edward Appleton. He was joined by Richard Gregory and Christoper Lonquet-Higgins who were both very interested in the development of a brain research institute.

  Donald Michie became in 1967, the first director of machine intelligence and perception and was appointed to a personal chair. For many the following period to 1973 was perceived as one of the most fertile in the history of artificial intelligence. All who were interested in this research recall the impact of this work and of the publication of the series of books “Machine Intelligence”.

  One of the most important achievements of this period was the development of his research team's Freddy II. This was the world's first demonstration of a robot that was capable of using computer vision feedback in assembling complex objects from a pile of parts. Circumstances prevented this exciting development from reaching fruition. After the Lighthill report, commissioned by the UK's Science Research Council, published in 1973 artificial intelligence research was halted in all but two areas, Donald Michie and his group's robot program was discontinued although he continued his researches into computer chess and machine learning. It took the Japanese Fifth Generation project to revive interest and the UK with Europe and the USA took up AI projects again. 1986 saw Dr Michie found the Turing Institute in Glasgow and research in industrially-oriented fields such as machine learning, robotics and computer vision were initiated.

  Professor Michie who was born 11 November 1923, continued his researches following his retirement in the early 1990s until his death on 7 July 2007.

  Cyberneticists, systemists and those who worked in the computing field in the 1960s and 1970s recall with pleasure their visits to his research group in Edinburgh and the inspiration they received from the team's pioneering endeavours in the field of artificial intelligence.