Professor Donald Michie, 84, and his ex-wife Dame Anne McLaren, 80, were killed in a car crash as they travelled from Cambridge to London yesterday, reports Reuters.
Michie worked with Alan Turing and Jack Good on code-breaking at Bletchley Park and more recently wrote a book, Secrets of Colossus Revealed. He went on to be director of the University of Edinburgh's Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception and was founder, director and chief scientist at the Turing Institute in Glasgow.
I got to know him slightly in the early 80s when he was marketing ExpertEase, a spreadsheet-style artificial intelligence program for the IBM PC. We kept vaguely in touch and he wrote a few articles for us, such as Putting a personality in a PC, and at least three Second Sight columns in what was then the Online section.
One of these columns began: "A possible future for the internet is that humans and computers will grow together to form what biologists might term a single symbiotic life-form." (June 15, 2000) He followed this up wondering whether the relationship would be symbiotic or parasitic.
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