The use of machine learning to teach computers to play board games has had a lot of interest lately. Big companies such as Facebook and Google have both made recent breakthroughs in teaching AI the complex board game, Go. However, people have been using machine learning to teach computers board games since the mid-twentieth century. In the early 1960s Donald Michie, a British computer scientist who helped break the German Tunny code during the Second World War, came up with Menace (the Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine). Menace uses 304 matchboxes all filled with coloured beads in order to learn to play noughts and crosses.

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.

Donald Michie, a versatile British scientist and early theorist of artificial intelligence who helped develop a "smart" industrial robot and then applied the technology to diverse fields, died on July 7 in Britain. Dr. Michie (pronounced MICK-ee) died in a car accident near London along with his former wife, Anne McLaren, a biologist and pioneering researcher in the field of reproduction. In the early 1970s, in work that received international attention and helped make Britain a force in advancing artificial intelligence, Dr. Michie led a team that produced "Freddy," a computer-directed robotic arm that could choose and assemble parts from a jumbled and potentially confusing array. To demonstrate Freddy's capabilities, Dr. Michie programmed the machine to put together the parts of a toy truck. Nils J. Nilsson, an emeritus professor of engineering at Stanford University and a former chairman of the department of computer science there, said the machine was "ahead of its time" and impressed researchers at Stanford and elsewhere as "one of the first automatic assembly systems in the world."

He made contributions of crucial international significance in three distinct fields of endeavour. During the second world war, he developed code-breaking techniques which led to effective automatic deciphering of German high-level ciphers. In the 1950s, he worked with Anne on pioneering techniques which were fundamental in the development of in vitro fertilisation. Donald subsequently became one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, an area to which he devoted the remainder of his academic career. It was within this field that I came to know Donald as an inspirational supervisor of my PhD at Edinburgh - not only insightful, forceful and even heroic, but possessing a wicked sense of humour.

Donald Michie was born on 11 November 1923, and was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford. He obtained the MA, DPhil, and DSc degrees from Oxford University for studies in biological sciences. For contributions to artificial intelligence he was elected a founding Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. He has received honorary degrees from the UK's National Council of Academic Awards, from Salford University, Aberdeen University, the University of York and the University of Stirling.

C. COOPER 21 3 Data representation--the key to conceptualisation: D. B. VIGOR 33 MECHANISED MATHEMATICS 45 4 An approach to analytic integration using ordered algebraic expressions: L. I. HODGSON 47 5 Some theorem-proving strategies based on the resolution principle: J. L DARLINGTON 57 MACHINE LEARNING AND HEURISTIC PROGRAMMING 73 6 Automatic description and recognition of board patterns in Go-Moku: A. M. MURRAY and E. W. Etcomc

R.M.BURSTALL 373 23 Assertions: programs written without specifying unnecessary order.