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Donald Michie.Author Petermowforth.

Top 10 Best Facts About Donald Michie

Donald Michie was a British researcher in artificial intelligence. During World War II, he worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, contributing to the effort to solve “Tunny”, a German teleprinter cipher. He was born in Rangoon, Burma.

1. Donald Was A Scholar

 After attending Rugby School, he was offered 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 in a Japanese language course in Bedford for intelligence officers. On arrival, he discovered that he had been misinformed, and instead he decided to train in cryptography, displaying a natural aptitude for the subject.

Six weeks later, he was recruited to Bletchley Park and was assigned to the “Tester”, a section that tackled a German teleprinter cipher. During his time at Bletchley Park, he worked with Alan Turing, Max Newman, and Jack Good.

Between 1945 and 1952 he studied at Balliol College, Oxford; he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree for research in mammalian genetics, in 1953.

2. He Is Regarded As The Father Of British Research Into Artificial intelligence

 Donald Michie is regarded as the father of British research into artificial intelligence (AI).  Following a successful early career as a mammalian geneticist, Michie devoted his life to the development of computers that could perform complex, human-like tasks.

His initial interest was sparked during his wartime service as a cryptographer at Bletchley Park where he forged a friendship with Alan Turing while playing chess and discussing the potential of computers. The two toiled with the idea of developing an early computer program that could play chess.

In 1960, he developed a computer program that could learn to play a perfect game of noughts and crosses.  Lacking a computer to test the program, MENACE (Machine Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine) was built from matchboxes and colored beads that corresponded to all potential possibilities in a game, winning Michie a bet in the process.

3. He Is Credited For Developing The Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine (MENACE)

He was at it again in 1960, when he developed the Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine (MENACE). This is one of the first programs capable of learning to play a perfect game of noughts and crosses.

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 colored beads, each representing a different move in that board state. The quantity of color indicated the “certainty” that playing the corresponding move would lead to a win.

4. He Founded The University of Edinburg’s Department of Intelligence And Perception

The University Of Edinburg. Photo by Tommaso wang on Unsplash

Michie was a founder and director of the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception (previously the Experimental Programming Unit) in 1965. The machine intelligence unit predated the university’s computer science unit. He remained in 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 a charity registered in the UK. He 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 memorization technique.

 5. He Received Various Awards And Honors For His Outstanding Work

 He was awarded numerous fellowships and honors during his career including Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) (1969[16]), Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001), Corresponding Fellow of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (2005).

6. Michie’s Papers Can Be Found At The British Library

The Donald Michie Papers are housed at the British Library. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalog.

The Donald Michie Papers comprise three separate tranches of material gifted to the library in 2004 and 2008.  They consist of correspondence, notes, notebooks, offprints, and photographs and are available to researchers through the British Library’s Explore Archives and Manuscripts catalog at Add MS 88958, Add MS 88975 and Add MS 89072

7. He Was Part Of The Team That Developed Freddy Machines

, Michie and his team developed and built a pair of machines, affectionately known as Freddy I and Freddy II.  These machines were capable of learning to identify the parts of and assemble model toys, such as a car or a boat, integrating perception and action into one machine.

8. He Played A Key Role In The Lighthill Report

Michie’s importance was most evident from his prominent role in the Lighthill Report and Debate in 1972-73. This report suggested that research into AI had overpromised and underdelivered on its capabilities to that point.  A televised debate in 1973 saw Lighthill opposite Michie and two fellow researchers into AI: James McCarthy and Richard Gregory.

Michie, McCarthy, and Gregory were not successful.  The outcome of Lighthill’s intervention became known as the AI Winter.  Funding for research into AI was slashed across the UK (and, shortly after, in the USA).  However, Edinburgh retained its research into AI, albeit with a departmental restructure in 1974.  Michie continued his research at the University for a further decade before moving on to co-found the Turing Institute in Glasgow as Director of Research.

9. Michie Developed A Chat-Hot Machine Named Sophie

 Michie developed a chatbot named Sophie. Sophie was intended as a challenge to the Turing test, i.e. can a machine convince a human it is human? To Michie, ‘the value of the Turing test is not what it says about machine intelligence, but what it says about human intelligence. He gave Sophie a sense of humor, a backstory, and a family; in essence, Sophie had a personality.

 Apparently ‘Southern California Trash’ was an apt accent for her personality when demonstrating the speech-generating software.

10. He Was A Pioneer In Many Fields

 Donald Michie was an extraordinary character. In a scientific career that spanned nearly 65 years, he was a pioneer in several fields including computing, mouse embryology, transplantation biology, and machine intelligence. Tragically, he died in a car crash in 2007.