Donald Michie FRSE FBCS

Donald Michie was one of the early pioneers of Artificial Intelligence who had a distinguished career at Bletchley Park exploiting the German teleprinter cipher known as TUNNY, and after the war went on to become the Director of the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at the University of Edinburgh.

Michie was born in Rangoon, Burma on 11th November 1923 and was a Classics Scholar from Balliol College in Oxford. He joined the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park working Initially in the German Police Section under Major Pritchard. Whilst at Bletchley his interactions with Alan Turing implanted an interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and particularly in machine learning, which stayed with him throughout his subsequent career.

He was the first cryptographic assistant to Dr Max Newman when he joined the Hut F Testery in late 1942 and remained with Newman from when he formed the ‘Newmanry’ research team in early 1943 until the end of the War. Michie worked closely with Newman and Jack Good during this period and he was to have a radical impact on the new high-speed electronic machines fostered by the collaboration of Newman's group with the GPO research team at Dollis Hill, headed up by Tommy Flowers. The result of this work was the special-purpose computer known as COLOSSUS, the first variant being delivered to Bletchley in January 1944.

After the War Michie went back to Balliol College in Oxford and attained a PhD in his research on Mammalian genetics. He went on to become the Professor of Machine Intelligence at Edinburgh University where he remained until 1985, before moving to Glasgow to establish the Turing Institute. He remained active in the research community well into his eighties, devoting much of his time with the Human Computer Learning Foundation. Michie died on the 7th July 2007