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.

When Stanford University's robotic Volkswagen Touareg, "Stanley," won the Grand Challenge last week, robot enthusiasts everywhere cheered. By completing a 210-kilometer course over difficult desert terrain in just under seven hours, Stanley set an unprecedented milestone for autonomous vehicles. Even more amazingly, four other teams' vehicles also completed the course, with slightly slower times. "It's kind of like if you had challenged people to fly across the Atlantic, and instead of one guy [making it], just Lindbergh, you had five guys flying across at the same time," says Sebastian Thrun, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and the leader of the Stanford team. The Lindbergh analogy is apt.

Mr Gregory was a pioneer of human psychology, and made significant advances in the fast-changing world of artificial intelligence. Born in London in 1923, he was the son of astronomer Christopher Gregory. Mr Gregory spent five years in the RAF during the Second World War, after being called up at the age of 18. After exhibiting obvious academic talent the RAF offered Mr Gregory a scholarship to study philosophy and experimental psychology at Downing College, Cambridge and after proving himself a successful scientist and inventor he moved to Edinburgh, where he took up a post as professor of bionics. There he co-founded the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception, the first of its kind in the UK.

The game of poker has been identified as a beneficial domain for current AI research because of the properties it possesses such as the need to deal with hidden information and stochasticity. The identification of poker as a useful research domain has inevitably resulted in increased attention from academic researchers who have pursued many separate avenues of research in the area of computer poker. The poker domain has often featured in previous review papers that focus on games in general, however a comprehensive review paper with a specific focus on computer poker has so far been lacking in the literature. In this paper, we present a review of recent algorithms and approaches in the area of computer poker, along with a survey of the autonomous poker agents that have resulted from this research. We begin with the first serious attempts to create strong computerised poker players by constructing knowledge-based and simulation-based systems.

Even the most intelligent, complex brains can be taken by a swindler's story, a new study from Case Western Reserve University shows, even stories that prove false upon a second look. Our brains cycle between the social and analytical networks at rest, when presented with a task, however healthy adults engage the appropriate neural pathway. We have built-in neural constraints on our ability to be both empathetic and analytic at the same time, the study shows. The findings of this new study suggest that established theories about two competing networks within the brain need to be revised. It also provides insights into how a healthy mind works versus a mentally ill or developmentally disabled brain.

"I like to think that since I was about 19, I have studied human decision-making and problem-solving," Dr. Simon said in a Post-Gazette interview last fall. He earned a doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago in 1943 and took teaching positions at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the newly established industrial administration school at the Carnegie Institute of Technology.

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.

Psychological research was in a kind of rut in 1955 when George A. Miller, a professor at Harvard, delivered a paper titled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," which helped set off an explosion of new thinking about thinking and opened a new field of research known as cognitive psychology. The dominant form of psychological study at the time, behaviorism, had rejected Freud's theories of "the mind" as too intangible, untestable and vaguely mystical. Its researchers instead studied behavior in laboratories, observing and recording test subjects' responses to carefully administered stimuli. Dr. Miller, who died on July 22 at his home in Plainsboro, N.J., at the age of 92, revolutionized the world of psychology by showing in his paper that the human mind, though invisible, could also be observed and tested in the lab. "George Miller, more than anyone else, deserves credit for the existence of the modern science of mind," the Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker said in an interview.

The 3-D research was seminal in the fields of computer vision and artificial intelligence. Known as "constraint propagation," the technique is now used in industry for solving problems like route scheduling, package routing and construction scheduling. At M.I.T., Dr. Waltz was taught by Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in artificial intelligence. Dr. Waltz graduated in 1972, then taught computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and, later, at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. But it was as a member of a group of researchers at the Thinking Machines Corporation, in Cambridge, Mass., that Dr. Waltz made his breakthrough in information retrieval.

"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.