RIP: Professor Donald Michie Michie became close friends with Turing, though he did not realise that Turing was a homosexual until after the war.
In 1954 Turing died after being "outed" in a court case; the inquest verdict of suicide is still debated. Michie had assured Turing his reputation among his peers would not be affected, but Turing remained fearful that the academic establishment would disown him.
He married secondly, in 1952, the geneticist Anne (later Dame Anne) McLaren, daughter of the second Lord Aberconway; they had a son and two daughters and although they were divorced in 1959 they remained good friends. Dame Anne died with him in the car accident on Saturday. Professor Donald Michie Last Updated: 12:01am BST 09/07/2007Professor Donald Michie, who died in a motor accident on Saturday aged 83, was a pioneer in the creation of artificial intelligence; during the war he worked on breaking German codes at Bletchley Park and later, as Professor of Machine Intelligence at Edinburgh University, helped to bring about the world of robots, computer games and search engines.
Known to his colleagues as "Duckmouse", Donald Michie was one of the great multi-disciplinarians of his generation. A classical scholar at the start, he worked with mathematicians - and especially Alan Turing - at Bletchley, then went into genetics until computers caught up with his ambitions to "build a brain" before putting together his team at Edinburgh.
He showed the extent of his vision when, at the British Association meeting of 1968, he forecast that householders would one day tap information from computers in the same way that they could draw water, gas or electricity.
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