Donald Michie on machine intelligence, biology and more

In Donald Michie on machine intelligence, biology and more, Ashwin Srinivasan has compiled a collection of articles by Michie ranging from his work with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park to his comments on the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Michie spent much of his life working on artificial intelligence, and so that takes up the largest part of the book, with articles discussing the Turing test, computer chess and robotics. Most of all, Michie thought that the way forward was to build a machine which learned, (rather than programming an AI from scratch), and he was constantly arguing for more funding for this approach. The book also includes some of Michie's work in biology in the 1950's and 60's and concludes with a selection of his writings about science in society.

The aim of this book is clearly to be something other that a collection of academic papers, but I felt that it didn't really hit the mark. The individual articles are interesting, but they don't gel together to give the sort of picture of Michie as a person which a biography would. If you're interested in the history of AI then you might give this book a try, but I wouldn't particularly recommend it otherwise.