Highway car crash kills leading scientists

London: British artificial intelligence expert, Donald Michie, and his ex-wife, leading geneticist Dame Anne McLaren, have died in a car crash, their son said yesterday.

Michie, 84, and McLaren, 80, were killed when their car veered off a highway while they were travelling from Cambridge to the home they shared in London on Saturday, their son Jonathan Michie said.

Michie was a pioneering artificial intelligence researcher who worked as part of the British code-breaking group at Bletchley Park during Second World War. He contributed to the effort to solve Tunny, a German teleprinter cipher.

"This is a tragic event especially since Donald was preparing a major lecture to be delivered at the University of Edinburgh on the history of machine intelligence," Jonathan Michie said. He was appointed director of the University of Edinburgh's Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception when it was established in 1966 and was founder and editor-in-chief of the Machine Intelligence publication series.

Pioneer

In the late 1980s, Michie was chief scientist at the Turing Institute in Glasgow, Scotland, where he was trying to develop computers that learn from experience - a technology that could result in robots that adjust to changing circumstances and learn from mistakes.

His former wife, McLaren, with whom he remained close friends after their divorce in 1959, was a leading geneticist who became the first female officer of the Royal Society, holding the post of foreign secretary from 1991-1996.