In the hush-hush surroundings of Bletchley Park, as the Nazi threat marched ever closer, two charismatic characters were deep in thought.
At one side of the chess board sat mathematical genius Alan Turing, a complex character whose name became synonymous with the heroic effort to decode the German military’s Enigma cipher machine. Cracking it would help save countless lives, fast-forward the end of the war and set the course of history.
And at the other side was 20-year-old Donald Michie. Perhaps a name less well-known than Turing’s is today, but his equal when it came to chess: neither, despite their brilliant minds, seemed to have totally mastered it.
As each mulled over their next move, the conversation drifted as to whether one day a machine might have more success at conquering the game.
According to Prof. Drew Hemment, director and principal investigator at Edinburgh’s AI, creativity and futures research hub, The New Real, those late-night Bletchley Park chess sessions would lay the foundations for a remarkable six decades of pioneering work, hundreds of miles north of 1940s Milton Keynes.
And they would help set Burma-born Prof. Michie, his razor-sharp mind ignited by the potential of machines that might think for themselves, on his way to helping Edinburgh become a world leading centre for the advancement of artificial intelligence.
Although the age of AI, chatbots, digital assistants and robotics may seem a very modern one – and set to be explored by a range of expert voices later this month at the Scottish AI Summit in Glasgow – this year marks six decades of artificial intelligence research at the University of Edinburgh, rooted in a small group established in 1963 in a flat at 4 Hope Park Square by Prof. Michie.
