[SCC_Active_Members] FW: Donald Michie

[H.M. Gladney]

FYI


Cheerio, Henry

-----Original Message-----
From: John F. Sowa [mailto:sowa at bestweb.net] 
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2007 6:05 AM
To: paulan at earthlink.net; H.M. Gladney
Cc: John L. Bennett; Peter Lucas; John/Helen Swinden;
peter.farwell at rogers.com; thomas.kierluk at sympatico.ca; Tom Gladney
Subject: Donald Michie

Sad news.  Donald Michie, one of the pioneers in AI, died in a car crash on
Saturday:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/09/car_crash/
    Bletchley Park scientist dies in car crash

I had met him at various conferences, and I sometimes cited his work.
One of my favorite examples was Michie's idea of using English for
communicating among robots:

  1. Recognition of normal human speech is very difficult because
     people never pronounce the same phoneme in exactly the same way.
     But computer-generated speech is extremely regular and easy to
     recognize.

  2. When robots are interacting, it is very difficult to determine
     what they are communicating to one another, and it would make
     debugging and testing much simpler if people could listen in.

  3. And in case of emergency, it would be important to be able
     to shout "Stop!"

But I didn't know that he had worked at Bletchley Park.

John