Donald Michie
More info
- Born
- 11 November 1923
- Died
- 7 July 2007
- Known for
- MENACE, machine learning in Britain
- Nationality
- British
The Bletchley veteran who taught a stack of matchboxes to play noughts and crosses — and founded British machine learning.
Donald Michie (1923–2007) set out to read classics but ended up at Bletchley Park in 1942, where he worked with Jack Good and Turing on Tunny and Colossus. The war gave him a taste for computation, and he switched tracks to biology and then artificial intelligence.
In 1961 he built MENACE (Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine): 304 matchboxes filled with coloured beads, one box per board position, which learned to play optimal noughts and crosses by being rewarded and punished — one of the earliest physical demonstrations of reinforcement learning. He founded the Department of Machine Intelligence at Edinburgh and remained a central, combative figure in British AI right up to the field's "winter" in the 1970s.