Donald Michie

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Donald Michie (born November 11, 1923 in Rangoon , Burma ; † July 7, 2007 ) was a British researcher in the field of artificial intelligence . In an obituary in the journal Nature , he was described as "the father of artificial intelligence in Great Britain" .

Life

During the Second World War, Michie worked in the GC&CS in Bletchley Park, England, on the deciphering of the German Lorenz key machine "Schlüsselzusatz SZ 40/42", known by the English as Tunny (German: "Tuna"). Between 1945 and 1952 he studied anatomy and physiology at Balliol College and Oxford University . In 1953 he received his PhD in genetics as a DPhil . Between 1952 and 1958 he was a research assistant in the zoological faculty of the University of London . Since 1958 he has taught at the University of Edinburgh . In 1971 he became a ScD in Life Sciences PhD .

Michie was director of the University of Edinburgh 's Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception (formerly: Experimental Programming Unit) since it was founded in 1966. From 1974 until his retirement in 1984 he was head of the Machine Intelligence Research Unit in Edinburgh . Together with Bernard Meltzer, he made the University of Edinburgh into a center for research on artificial intelligence in Europe from the late 1960s .

He has taught as visiting professor at the University of Birmingham , the Russian Academy of Sciences , Oxford University and Princeton University . For his scientific work on artificial intelligence, he became a member of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence . He was a full member of the British Computer Society , the Royal Society of Edinburgh , an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts . Michie was honorary doctorates of the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) , the University of Salford , the University of Aberdeen , of York University and the University of Stirling excellent.

In 1995 he was honored with the Achievement Medal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (UK) for his research results in the field of computer applications and control, and in 1996 with the Feigenbaum Medal of the World Congress on Expert Systems for his developments in mechatronics . In 2001 he received the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence .

Professor Michie was the founder and editor of the journal Machine Intelligence . He was also the founder and treasurer of the Human-Computer Learning Foundation , a UK charity.

Michie was married to biologist Anne McLaren from 1955 to 1959 and is the father of economist Jonathan Michie . Donald Michie and Anne McLaren died in a car accident on the M11 between Cambridge and London. He left several children and grandchildren.

Act

Michie was one of the leading British experts in the field of artificial intelligence and developed the "Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine" (MENACE) in 1960, a "computer" based on hundreds of matchboxes that could learn tic-tac-toe. In the boxes, each representing a possible score, the possible moves were stored by different colored beads. Depending on whether a game was lost or won, the corresponding pearls were removed or the same color added. As a result, the system learned successful moves and was invincible after a few hundred games.

He also developed the basics of memoisation , which is used to accelerate computer programs by temporarily storing return values ​​from functions.

Fonts

  • Expert Systems in the Microelectronic Age , Edinburgh UP 1979, ISBN 0852243812
  • Machine Intelligence and Related Topics , Harwood Academic 1982, ISBN 0677055609
  • Introductory Readings in Expert Systems (Topics in Computer Mathematics) , Harwood Academic 1982, ISBN 0677163509
  • with Jean E. Hayes: Intelligent Systems: The Unprecedented Opportunity , Longman 1984, ISBN 0853128316
  • with Rory Johnston: The Creative Computer: Machine Intelligence and Human Knowledge , Viking 1984, ISBN 0670800600
    • German translation: The creative computer. Artificial Intelligence and Human Knowledge. , Rasch and Röhring 1987, ISBN 3-89136-037-1

From 1967 to 2000 he was the editor of 17 volumes in the Machine Intelligence series , first published by Oliver and Boyd in Edinburgh and then by Edinburgh University Press and Clarendon Press, among others.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Margaret Boden: Donald Michie (1923-2007). Father of artificial intelligence in Britain. In: Nature , Volume 448, p. 765, 2007
  2. ^ Book of Members. Retrieved July 26, 2016 .
  3. ↑ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/6281348.stm
  4. ↑ John Roycroft : † Donald Michie ('DM') 11xi1923-7vii2007 . In: eg 170 (October 2007), pp. 156–157.
  5. ↑ Oliver Child: Menace: the Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine. March 13, 2016, accessed December 19, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Implementing MENACE , Uppsala University, Department of Information Technology
  7. ↑ Memo functions: a language feature with "red learning" properties. Research Memorandum MIP-R-29. Edinburgh, Department of Machine Intelligence & Perception. (1967)
  8. ↑ Machine Intelligence

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Michie, Donald
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British life scientist and researcher
DATE OF BIRTH November 11, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Rangoon
DATE OF DEATH July 7, 2007