Donald Michie

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Donald Michie (born 11 November 1923) is a British researcher in artificial intelligence.

During World War II, Michie worked at Bletchley Park, contributing to the effort to solve "Tunny", a German teleprinter cipher. Between 1945 and 1952 he studied at Balliol College, Oxford; he received his DPhil in 1953.

In 1960, he developed the Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine (MENACE), one of the first programs capable of learning to play a perfect game of Tic-Tac-Toe. Since computers were not readily available at this time, Michie implemented his program with about 300 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 a color indicated the "certainty" that playing the corresponding move would lead to a win. The program was trained by playing hundreds of games and updating the quantities of beads in each matchbox depending on the outcome of each game.

He was director of the University of Edinburgh's Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception (previously the Experimental Programming Unit) from its establishment in 1966. The machine intelligence unit predated the university's computer science unit.

He was married to biologist Anne McLaren from 1952–1959, and is the father of economist Jonathan Michie.

"Memo Functions" were invented by Michie.^[1]

[edit] Notes

^ Memo functions: a language feature with "rote-learning" properties. Research Memorandum MIP-R-29. Edinburgh, Department of Machine Intelligence & Perception. (1967)