Donald Michie, 83, Theorist of Artificial Intelligence, Dies

Donald Michie, 83, Theorist of Artificial Intelligence, Dies
By JEREMY PEARCE

Donald Michie, a versatile British scientist and early theorist of artificial intelligence who helped develop a “smart” industrial robot and then applied the technology to diverse fields, died on July 7 in Britain. He was 83.
Dr. Michie (pronounced MICK-ee) died in a car accident near London along with his former wife, Anne McLaren, a biologist and pioneering researcher in the field of reproduction.
In the early 1970s, in work that received international attention and helped make Britain a force in advancing artificial intelligence, Dr. Michie led a team that produced “Freddy,” a computer-directed robotic arm that could choose and assemble parts from a jumbled and potentially confusing array. To demonstrate Freddy’s capabilities, Dr. Michie programmed the machine to put together the parts of a toy truck.
Nils J. Nilsson, an emeritus professor of engineering at Stanford University and a former chairman of the department of computer science there, said the machine was “ahead of its time” and impressed researchers at Stanford and elsewhere as “one of the first automatic assembly systems in the world.”
Dr. Nilsson added that industry had been slow to see Freddy’s potential, and it was not until the 1980s, after industries in Japan began to use robotic machines in manufacturing, that the work of Dr. Michie and other scientists was fully appreciated.
Earlier, in the 1960s, Dr. Michie developed an ingenious mechanical computer that he named Menace. The device was constructed of matchboxes and designed to play tick-tack-toe, recording information about successful moves by trapping colored beads in its boxes. A player would then consult the beads to determine what move to make next.
Menace and its 300 matchboxes proved important beyond games-playing as a relatively simple “machine that could actually learn from past games, and was therefore quite revolutionary,” said Bart Selman, a professor of computer science at Cornell who studies artificial intelligence.
In the 1970s, Dr. Michie, who trained as a geneticist, turned his hand to writing computer programs to solve complex problems in industry and science. His research has been used to improve flight simulators for pilot training and to increase the efficiency of a uranium refining plant. In 1979, he explained his ideas in “Expert Systems in the Microelectronic Age,” a book that Dr. Selman said brought “a level of scientific quality to the field that remains unmatched.”
Dr. Michie’s earliest scientific endeavors took place at Bletchley Park, the secret British intelligence center, where he was a cryptographer from 1942 to 1945. There he worked on “Colossus,” the high-speed computer, in helping to more rapidly break Germany’s wartime codes.
Donald Michie was born in what was then Rangoon, Burma. He earned his doctorate in mammalian genetics from Oxford in 1953.
He joined the University of Edinburgh as a senior lecturer in surgical science in 1958. Edinburgh named him a professor of machine intelligence in 1967, and he remained there until retiring in 1984. Dr. Michie also served as chairman of the university’s department of machine intelligence and perception.
He later taught at the Turing Institute, which he helped to found, at the University of Glasgow.
Dr. Michie, who was married two other times, is survived by two sons and two daughters.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company