Professor Donald Michie

Donald Michie was born in Rangoon in 1923. His father was a banker. After the family returned to England he attended Rugby and in 1942 he won an open scholarship to study classics at Balliol College, Oxford. Hoping to contribute to the war effort, in the summer of 1942 he deferred his place at Oxford and applied for a course in Japanese for intelligence officers. The course was full, so he instead trained in cryptography and was recruited to Bletchley Park, the secret codebreaking establishment which decoded the German Enigma messages.

At Bletchley Park he worked closely with Jack Good and Alan Turing to crack more sensitive messages, code-named Tunny. One of the codebreakers’ main tools was an early electrome-chanical computer, Colossus, and Michie made significant improvements to its efficiency and usability, releasing the mathematicians from operational duties and reducing the time needed to decode the intercepted messages.

Michie and Turing were close friends at Bletchley – Michie was one of the few who could match the mathematician at chess. During games they discussed the possibilities of building a chess-playing computer, part of the larger project of creating an artificial intelligence.

In 1946 Michie left Bletchley. The Colossus computers were broken up, and the work done was kept secret until 1989. Despite his introduction to mathematics and the nascent field of computer science, he returned to Oxford to read medicine in 1946, taking the preclinical course and obtaining a masters in human anatomy and physiology. He began work on a doctorate in mammalian genetics.

In 1949 he was briefly married to Zena Davies, and the couple had one son. In 1952 he married Anne McLaren, a fellow geneticist who had just been awarded her doctorate from Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. Michie received his DPhil in 1953, and he and his wife moved to London where both began work in the Department of Zoology at UCL.

The couple rapidly established themselves in the fast-growing field of genetics research, working with a team that included J. B. S. Haldane, Peter Medawar and Alex Comfort. They made significant advances in embryology, developing techniques that would later be used for in vitro fertilisation. In 1958 Michie moved to the Surgical Science Unit at Edinburgh University, working in the field of immunology and genetics while his wife remained in London. They divorced in 1959.

Michie had kept in touch with Turing – who committed suicide in 1954, after a conviction for “acts of gross indecency” – and was aware of the work being done on machine learning at the National Physical Laboratory, exploring games-playing computers similar to the chess-playing machines that he and Turing had discussed over their chess matches at Bletchley Park.

Although early computers were popularly thought of as calculating machines, many early computer scientists were mathematicians and were well aware that computers could be used for different kinds of symbolic manipulation. Numbers, letters or the rules of a game were all just different types of information to be programmed.

Michie’s interest in machine learning and games-playing continued to develop, but lacking access to a computer he was forced to develop his systems on paper.

In 1960 he built Menace, the Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine, a game-playing machine consisting of 300 matchboxes and a collection of glass beads of different colours. Each box had a noughts-and-crosses game position drawn on it, and beads inside to represent possible moves that could be made from that position. Inside each box was a wedge that could trap one bead, and a move was chosen by shaking the matchbox and opening it to show which colour bead had been trapped. Menace was able to “learn” from experience, as each time a game was played beads were added to the box to reinforce successful moves.

The system so impressed the US Office of Naval Research that Michie was invited to Stanford to implement Menace on an IBM computer. On his return to England he persuaded the new Science Research Council to fund research into machine intelligence.

The Experimental Programming Unit was established in 1965 at Edinburgh University, with Michie as its first director. He was appointed Professor of Machine Intelligence at Edinburgh in 1967, and the unit changed its name to the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning were popular research topics in the 1960s and 1970s, with most researchers confident that the main goals of building intelligent computers that could perceive the outside world and respond appropriately would soon be achieved. As it became clear that they had significantly underestimated the complexity of the problem, attention shifted to specific areas, such as computer vision, robotics, machine translation and expert systems that could deal with limited domains of knowledge.

Michie’s primary research involved finding ways for machines to extract rules and behaviours from example data, so that they could learn from experience, and he developed the technique of “standard induction”. This was effectively applied in industrial plants, for example at a uranium reprocessing plant in Pennsylvania.

Aware of the broader applications of his research, Michie developed a commercial version, ExpertEase, to make the process of extracting general rules from human experts more efficient.

In the early 1970s Michie and his team built Freddy, the first robot that was able to learn by being shown how to assemble an object from its parts, using computer vision to recognise components. However, cuts in research funding for AI led to the closure of the robot project.

In 1971 he married Jean Hayes, a fellow computer scientist. He had always remained close to McLaren and this did not change after his remarriage.

Michie retired from Edinburgh in 1984, retaining an emeritus chair. A revival of interest in robotics and expert systems meant that funding was once more available for research, and in 1986 he established the Turing Institute at Strathclyde University, becoming its first director of research.

He was also involved in the commercial exploitation of breakthroughs in machine learning as a director of Intelligent Terminals Ltd, producing the SuperExpert expert system development tool.

In the 1990s he and his wife moved to London, and after she died in 2002 he moved to Oxford. Two years later he and McLaren bought a house in London.

Michie remained active in the research community and until 2000 he was chief editor of the Edinburgh University Press series Machine Intelligence, which he had established in 1967. He recently delivered a lecture on the history of machine intelligence at the University of Edinburgh.

Michie was elected as a Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1971 and was made a foreign honorary member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences in 2001. He was awarded the Achievement Medal by the Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1995, the Feigenbaum Medal by the World Congress on Expert Systems in 1996, the ICJAI award for research excellence in 2001 and the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence lifetime achievement award in 2004.

His significant publications include An Introduction to Molecular Biology (1964), On Machine Intelligence (1974) and The Creative Computer (1984). In 2001 he published Secrets of Colossus Revealed, about his wartime experiences. He was awarded honorary degrees by many universities, including Salford, Aberdeen and York.

On July 7 he was travelling from Cambridge to London with McLaren when their car was involved in an accident and both died. He is survived by his son from his first marriage, and by the two daughters and son from his marriage to Anne McLaren.

Professor Donald Michie, geneticist and pioneer in machine learning, was born on November 11, 1923. He died on July 7, 2007, aged 83