OBITUARY : Professor Donald Michie

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
09/07/2007

OBITUARY : Professor Donald Michie
----------------------------------

Professor Donald Michie, who died in a motor accident on Saturday aged 83,
was a pioneer in the creation of artificial intelligence; during the war
he worked on breaking German codes at Bletchley Park and later, as
Professor of Machine Intelligence at Edinburgh University, helped to bring
about the world of robots, computer games and search engines.

Known to his colleagues as "Duckmouse", Donald Michie was one of the great
multi-disciplinarians of his generation. A classical scholar at the start,
he worked with mathematicians - and especially Alan Turing - at Bletchley,
then went into genetics until computers caught up with his ambitions to
"build a brain" before putting together his team at Edinburgh..../snip/

....Donald Michie was born in Rangoon on November 11 1923, the son of
James Michie and the former Marjorie Crain. From Rugby he won a classical
scholarship to Balliol, becoming - according to wartime colleagues -
"curator of the Balliol Book of Bawdy Verse".

In 1942 he was recruited to Bletchley Park. He was put into Hut F, working
to crack the Wehrmacht's "Tunny" machine, which encoded material more
sensitive than that carried by the now celebrated "Enigma".

The team's success gave the Allies access for the first time to German
army situation reports in the run-up to D-Day, with invaluable insights
into troop dispositions in France.

Crucial to cracking "Tunny" was "Colossus", the complex electro-mechanical
analytical device put together by Turing and others to work out the
permutations of positioning for the wheels in German cipher machines.

It was capable of performing 10 to the power of 11 Boolean mathematical
calculations without a significant error; Michie's greatest contribution
was to simplify its working so that it could be operated by Wrens instead
of by higher mathematicians without the need to halt it.

Michie became close friends with Turing, though he did not realise that
Turing was a homosexual until after the war. Michie was one of the few at
Bletchley Park who could match Turing at chess, and they discussed at
their weekly sessions the possibility of developing a chess-playing
machine.

Fearing a German invasion might devalue his bank account, Turing turned
his savings into bullion and buried the bars at several sites in the
surrounding countryside.

For "security reasons" he did not make a map, and after the war he asked
Michie to help him retrieve the silver using a home-made metal detector;  
the only stash they located was under a stream and impossible to recover.  
Offered a third of the proceeds or £5 per visit, Michie had shrewdly
chosen the latter.

Turing's ambition was to create an artificial brain, an aim not helped by
the destruction of Colossus (kept a close secret until 1972) at the end of
the war while less advanced American machines were turned over to
industry.

His view, and Michie's, was that man and computer would achieve more
together than either would alone, and that machines had to learn before
they could achieve.

Michie returned to Oxford to read Medicine and to undertake research in
genetics, while also exploring ways of developing "paper machines" that
could play chess as a prelude to developing a wider intelligence.

He and Turing hoped to play their programs off against each other on the
Ferranti computer at Manchester, but were refused permission.

In 1952 Michie moved to University College London to continue his work on
genetics, joining a team that included J B S Haldane, Peter Medawar and
Alex Comfort in a former furniture repository replete with sinks
containing axolotls.

In 1954 Turing died after being "outed" in a court case; the inquest
verdict of suicide is still debated. Michie had assured Turing his
reputation among his peers would not be affected, but Turing remained
fearful that the academic establishment would disown him.

The mantle of developing intelligent machines now fell on Michie. He had
kept in touch, through Turing, with work on early game machines at the
National Physical Laboratory, and after his move in 1958 to Edinburgh's
School of Surgical Science, officially as an immunogeneticist, developed
MENACE out of 300 matchboxes and glass beads to play noughts and 
crosses..../snip/

....Donald Michie was married three times, the first two marriages ending
in divorce. He married first, in 1949, Zena Davies; they had a son.

He married secondly, in 1952, the geneticist Anne (later Dame Anne)  
McLaren, daughter of the second Lord Aberconway; they had a son and two
daughters and although they were divorced in 1959 they remained good
friends. Dame Anne died with him in the car accident on Saturday.

He married thirdly, in 1971, Jean Hayes.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/news/2007/07/09/db0901.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/news/2007/07/09/db0902.xml