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| Smart Computing® Encyclopedia |
| Michie, Donald | ||
| (Nov. 11, 1923- ) Donald Michie and Jack Good worked on the first large electronic valve computer that changed World War II dramatically. After Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, British code-breaking operations were moved from London to Bletchley Park (now a famous museum in England, with daily tours and exhibits). The Colossus computer, which was designed for the analytic tasks of counting and Boolean operations, was used to decrypt Lorenz radio traffic. The Lorenz machines were primitive, teletypewriter-based, digital, cipher systems based on processing binary data. The Germans used these machines to scramble messages between the Berlin supreme command and their army headquarters. Michie programmed the Colossus to take on more of the deciphering work, which accelerated the results. In a few hours of experimenting, Michie and Good validated the new design extension, and the new feature to Colossus numbers 2 through 10 was added, which almost automatically broke the Lorenz patterns (called wheel breaking). The time it took to decipher Lorenz messages was suddenly reduced from weeks to hours. When they developed the Colossus 2 in 1944, the British quickly built eight more, and by the end of the war, the Colossus 2 machines had decrypted 63 million characters of the German messages. This experience is responsible for Michie’s recent fame, his work with AI (artificial intelligence), the process of programming human intelligence into machines. AI is the construction of intelligent systems (anything that has an input and an output stream) and their analysis. It can have many faces, such as creativity, solving problems, pattern recognition, classification, and more. Michie is the founder of “The Machine Intelligence” series of books centered on the theme of intelligent agents and has served as editor in chief of the 17 associated volumes that have gone to press so far. He convened the first International Machine Intelligence Workshop at Edinburgh in 1965. He founded the British Computer Society Specialist Group in Expert Systems in 1980 and is a fellow of the British Computer Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Michie is also professor emeritus of Machine Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, a visitor in the University’s AI Applications Institute, an associate member of the Josef Stefan Institute of Slovenia, and founder and treasurer of the Human-Computer Learning Foundation, a charity registered in the United Kingdom. He was awarded the 1995 Achievement Medal from the IEEE (Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) for contributions to computing and control and the 1996 Feigenbaum Medal of the World Congress on Expert Systems for his development of machine learning in an industrial-strength tool. In 2001, he was selected as a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Michie was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College in Oxford, England. He earned his master’s degree in human anatomy and physiology in 1953, a doctorate of philosophy in mammalian genetics from 1952 to 1958, and a doctorate of science in biological sciences from Oxford University in 1971. He has authored, co-authored, edited, and co-edited dozens of books and publications on computers and machine intelligence and holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Salford, Stirling, Aberdeen, and York and the National Council for Academic Awards, all in the United Kingdom. | ||
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