Donald Michie (; 11 November 1923 – 7 July 2007)
was a British researcher in
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 r ...
.
During World War II, Michie worked for the
Government Code and Cypher School
Government Communications Headquarters, commonly known as GCHQ, is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the Uni ...
at
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years followin ...
, contributing to the effort to solve "
Tunny", a German teleprinter cipher.
Early life and education
Michie was born in
Rangoon, Burma.
He attended
Rugby School
Rugby School is a public school (English independent boarding school for pupils aged 13–18) in Rugby, Warwickshire, England.
Founded in 1567 as a free grammar school for local boys, it is one of the oldest independent schools in Britain. ...
and won a scholarship to study
classics at
Balliol College, Oxford. In early 1943, however, looking for some way to contribute to the war effort, Michie instead attempted to enroll on a Japanese language course in
Bedford
Bedford is a market town in Bedfordshire, England. At the 2011 Census, the population of the Bedford built-up area (including Biddenham and Kempston) was 106,940, making it the second-largest settlement in Bedfordshire, behind Luton, whilst ...
for intelligence officers. On arrival, it transpired that he had been misinformed, and instead he trained in cryptography, displaying a natural aptitude for the subject. Six weeks later, he was recruited to
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years followin ...
and was assigned to the "
Testery
The Testery was a section at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking station during World War II. It was set up in July 1942 as the "FISH Subsection" under Major Ralph Tester, hence its alternative name. Four founder members were Tester himself ...
", a section which tackled a German teleprinter cipher. During his time at Bletchley Park he worked with
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical co ...
,
Max Newman
Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman, FRS, (7 February 1897 – 22 February 1984), generally known as Max Newman, was a British mathematician and codebreaker. His work in World War II led to the construction of Colossus, the world's first operatio ...
and
Jack Good. Mchie and Good were on the initial staff of the
Newmanry.
Fom 1945 to 1952 he studied at
Balliol College, Oxford. He received his
Doctor of Philosophy (D Phil) degree for research in
mammalian
genetics
Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar wor ...
, in 1953.
Career and research
In 1960, he developed the
Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine (MENACE), one of the first programs capable of learning to play a perfect game of
noughts and crosses
Tic-tac-toe (American English), noughts and crosses (Commonwealth English), or Xs and Os (Canadian or Irish English) is a paper-and-pencil game for two players who take turns marking the spaces in a three-by-three grid with ''X'' or ''O''. ...
. Since computers were not readily available at this time, Michie implemented his program with about 304 matchboxes, each representing a unique board state. Each matchbox was filled with coloured beads, each representing a different move in that board state. The quantity of a colour indicated the "certainty" that playing the corresponding move would lead to a win. The program was trained by playing hundreds of games and updating the quantities of beads in each matchbox depending on the outcome of each game.
Michie was director of the
University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...
's Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception (previously the Experimental Programming Unit) from its establishment in 1965. The machine intelligence unit predated the university's computer science unit. He remained at Edinburgh until 1985, when he left to found
The Turing Institute in Glasgow. Active in the research community into his eighties, he devoted the last decade of his life to the UK charity The Human Computer Learning Foundation, and worked with
Stephen Muggleton,
Claude Sammut,
Richard Wheeler, and others on natural language systems and theories of intelligence. In 2007 he was completing a series of scientific articles on the Sophie Natural Language System and a book manuscript entitled "Jehovah's Creatures". Michie invented the
memoisation technique. He was founder and Treasurer of the Human-Computer Learning Foundation, a charity registered in the UK.
[
]
Awards and honours
He was awarded numerous fellowships and honours during his career including:
* Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". This socie ...
(FRSE) (1969)
* Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
(2001)
* Corresponding Fellow of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
The Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts ( sl, Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti (SAZU)) is the national academy of Slovenia, which encompasses science and the arts and brings together the top Slovene researchers and artists as members ...
(2005)
* Fellow of the British Computer Society
image:Maurice Vincent Wilkes 1980 (3).jpg, Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957
BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned socie ...
(FBCS) (1971)
Personal life and death
Michie was married three times, the second to biologist Anne McLaren from 1952 to 1959. He had four children, one by his first wife, and three by Prof. McLaren, including economist Jonathan Michie and health psychologist Susan Michie. Michie and McLaren remained friends after their divorce, and became close again after the death of his third wife. On 7 July 2007 Michie and McLaren were killed in a car crash, while travelling from Cambridge to London.
Legacy
The Donald Michie Papers are housed at the British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...
. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue.Donald Michie Papers
archives and manuscripts catalogue, the British Library. Retrieved 15 May 2020
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Michie, Donald
1923 births
2007 deaths
Academics of the University of Edinburgh
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
British computer scientists
Fellows of the British Computer Society
Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
History of artificial intelligence
People educated at Rugby School
Bletchley Park people
Road incident deaths in England
Artificial intelligence researchers
Foreign Office personnel of World War II
Michie family