Textbook of AI

1923–2007, Geneticist, AI researcher

Donald Michie was a Scottish geneticist and AI researcher who, after wartime service at Bletchley Park (where he worked on the Tunny cipher with Tutte and Good), founded the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at Edinburgh in 1965, the first UK university department dedicated to AI. Edinburgh became, with MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, one of the four great early AI institutions.

Michie's research contributions include the MENACE (Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine, 1961), a tic-tac-toe-learning device built from 304 matchboxes containing coloured beads, an early demonstration of reinforcement learning in physical hardware, and the BOXES algorithm (with Roger Chambers, 1968) for learning to balance an inverted pendulum. The latter remained for decades a standard benchmark for reinforcement-learning algorithms.

Michie was Lighthill's most prominent opponent in the 1973 Lighthill debate. He was killed in a road accident in 2007.