Donald Michie

British AI pioneer who founded machine-intelligence research at the University of Edinburgh. A wartime codebreaker at Bletchley Park, where he worked alongside Alan TuringAlan Turing, prop. n.: A British mathematician who worked out what computers can do in principle, helped break German codes in the Second World War, and proposed the best-known test of machine intelligence. and I. J. GoodI. J. Good, prop. n.: A British statistician who broke codes with Alan Turing and in 1965 argued that a machine smarter than us could design still smarter machines, setting off an 'intelligence explosion'., he trained as a geneticist after the war before returning to computing. His MENACE (1961), a noughts-and-crosses player built from 304 matchboxes holding colored beads, learned by adding or removing beads after wins and losses, an early demonstration of reinforcement learningreinforcement learning, n.: A way of teaching a computer program by trial and error: it tries actions, earns points for good results and penalties for bad ones, and gradually learns which choices pay off over time.. In 1965 he founded Edinburgh's Experimental Programming Unit, which grew into a department of machine intelligencemachine intelligence, n.: Intelligence shown by machines; another name for artificial intelligence, preferred by some because it does not suggest that such intelligence is fake. whose FREDDY robot assembled simple objects from parts; he introduced memo functions (memoization, 1968), devised the Graph Traverser search program with Jim Doran (1966) and launched the long-running Machine Intelligence workshops. Cuts after the Lighthill reportLighthill report, prop. n.: A 1973 review written for a British government research council that judged AI research to have fallen far short of its promises. It led to deep cuts in AI funding in the United Kingdom. (1973), which he publicly debated, curtailed the work. He later promoted learning expert rules from examples, which led to behavioral cloningbehavioral cloning, n.: The simplest way to copy an expert: record what the expert did in each situation and train an AI to predict the same action whenever it sees a similar situation., and founded the Turing Institute in Glasgow (1984).