Donald Michie
,Bletchley Parkcode-breaker and a pioneer ofartificial intelligenceand robotics,
died in a car accident on 7 July.
At Bletchley Park, the 20-year-old Michie conceived an idea for
programming Colossus, the first electronic computer, which reduced
the time taken to decrypt German code patterns during the war.
At Edinburgh University, he established a research group to
investigate building machines that could think and learn. This
group formed the nucleus of the Department of Machine Intelligence
and Perception, which was set up in 1967.
The department developed new computational tools and techniques
including the Pop-2 symbolic programming language, and its robotics
research resulted in a teachable robot capable of assembling
objects.
During the 1970s Michie was a regular contributor to Computer
Weekly. He founded the Turing Institute, Glasgow, in 1984 and his
later career was marked by a succession of honours and awards.
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