Donald Michie was born in Rangoon on November 11 1923, the son of James Michie and the former Marjorie Crain. From Rugby he won a classical scholarship to Balliol, becoming - according to wartime colleagues - "curator of the Balliol Book of Bawdy Verse". In 1942 he was recruited to Bletchley Park. He was put into Hut F, working to crack the Wehrmacht's "Tunny" machine, which encoded material more sensitive than that carried by the now celebrated "Enigma". The team's success gave the Allies access for the first time to German army situation reports in the run-up to D-Day, with invaluable insights into troop dispositions in France.

Who is responsible for the actions of a self-learning AI? SimSimi's de-facto execution by Thai authorities leaves questions unanswered. The AI chat robot SimSimi has been making waves in Thailand over the past few weeks, being the latest craze for the smartphone savvy crowd. But it stoked controversy and even protests, and has now been effectively banned from Thailand for showing the political leaders a reflection of something they do not wish to see. SimSimi is an artificial intelligence chatbot. It uses fuzzy logic algorithms to learn and respond to sentences that it knows and asks you to teach it sentences that it does not know. With enough of a user base, the idea is sound, and it learns and improves through more and more user interaction.

The potential usefulness of automatic computerized translation was recognized by the very first AI researchers in the 1950s. But it wasn't until new algorithms emerged in the 1980s and 1990s that the field made significant progress. Now, translation tools of great sophistication are playing a growing role in both everyday office use and for specialized fields, as the economy becomes increasingly globalized and companies sell products and services in multiple markets. The poster child for computer translation is Google Translate, the easy-to-use, general purpose Web-based translation engine that can handle nearly 60 languages. Google's Translate has the same 800-pound gorilla status in its world that the company's namesake product does in search.

For scientists and engineers involved with face-recognition technology,the recently released results of the Face Recognition Grand Challenge–more fully, the Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) 2006 and the Iris Challenge Evaluation (ICE) 2006–have been a quiet triumph. Sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the match up of face-recognition algorithms showed that machine recognition of human individuals has improved tenfold since 2002 and a hundredfold since 1995. Indeed, the best face-recognition algorithms now perform more accurately than most humans can manage. Overall, facial-recognition technology is advancing rapidly. Jonathon Phillips, program manager for the NIST tests and lead author of the agency's report, says that the intended goal of the Face Recognition Grand Challenge was always an order-of-magnitude improvement in recognition performance over the results from 2002.

We're a long way off from having a self-aware robot with an artificial intelligence close to what is seen in movies such as Her or Ex Machina. But for the first time, three humanoid robots showed a glimmer of self-consciousness by solving a classic philosophical problem. The robotic trio was composed of three old Nao models, but the experiment that was conducted on them was extremely novel -- and so were the results. The robots were programmed to think that two of them had been given a "dumbing pill" that would make them unable to speak (actually just a button that silenced them). However, they didn't know exactly which two of them had been silenced.

In the months leading up to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, a landmark test for autonomous vehicles, Sebastian Thrun, the head of Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab, could not know whether his team's robotic vehicle, nicknamed Stanley, would triumph. Yet when interviewed by NOVA producers Jason Spingarn-Koff and Joe Seamans, this robotics enthusiast was brimming with excitement, confident that the race would herald a new era of vehicles that drive themselves. Stanford computer scientist Sebastian Thrun has long been driven to make smart machines. Now a smart machine named Stanley can drive him. Sebastian Thrun: It's a no-brainer for me that at some point our cars will have the ability to drive themselves.

Dr. Engelbart died on Tuesday at 88 at his home in Atherton, Calif. His wife, Karen O'Leary Engelbart, said the cause was kidney failure. Computing was in its infancy when Dr. Engelbart entered the field. Computers were ungainly room-size calculating machines that could be used by only one person at a time. Someone would feed them information in stacks of punched cards and then wait hours for a printout of answers. Interactive computing was a thing of the future, or in science fiction.

"In the early 1970s, he presented a paper in France on buying and selling by computer, what is now called electronic commerce," said Whitfield Diffie, an Internet security expert who worked as a researcher for Dr. McCarthy at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. And in the study of artificial intelligence, "no one is more influential than John," Mr. Diffie said. While teaching mathematics at Dartmouth in 1956, Dr. McCarthy was the principal organizer of the first Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The idea of simulating human intelligence had been discussed for decades, but the term "artificial intelligence" -- originally used to help raise funds to support the conference -- stuck. In 1958, Dr. McCarthy moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, with Marvin Minsky, he founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of "discovery" -- providing documents relevant to a lawsuit -- the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates. But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, "e-discovery" software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Apple has released huge updates to its music apps, helping them work better together and with the company's new hardware. Both GarageBand and Logic Pro X – respectively the consumer and pro versions of Apple's music creation tools – have received major updates. The versions for the iPhone, iPad and Mac have all got updates, which allow the three to work together better. Chief among the updates is that both apps will now support the new Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro. Apple has now updated almost all of its apps to make use of the small touch screen, and in the music app it provides new buttons – which allow it to be used like a piano or a drum kit – all of which can be customised.