The 1st A.I. winter was 1973 when Donald Michie&#x27;s work was eviscerated by the Lighthill report.<p>Edinburgh University, under Michie, was leading the world in A.I. Michie, Ambler &amp; Popplestone&#x27;s 1969 Freddy Robot could assemble scattered bricks using A.I. vision &amp; GOF symbolic AI. Michie (&amp; Chambers) BOXES algorithm was succesfully learning to balance poles using reinforcement learning, from raw-sensor data outputting motor torques, real robotics trained end-to-end not simulated. Edinburgh had a rival LISP known as POPLOG (Popplestone &amp; Burstal) used UK &amp; Europe wide.<p>BOXES was akin to todays Neural Nets. Geoff Hinton attended Edinburgh briefly in the aftermath. What might have been ?<p>Edinburgh had both symbolic A.I. planning, a working vision system &amp; pragmatic bottom up machine learning until &#x27;73 &amp; Lighthill. Edinburgh&#x27;s was a unique approach - with bigger budgets the American labs favoured simulation (until 1985 when Rod Brooks showed it was a dead end) and without BOXES, Freddy became RAPT, symbolic, programmed GOFAI &amp; no learning. RAPT  failed because top-down reasoning was a computational quagmire in the real world &amp; it was too fragile to the slightest decalibration.<p>Edinburgh&#x27;s hybrid GOFAI &amp; behavior-based approaches got round calibration issues with SOMASS, Eddie &amp; Push-Slide. But programmed solutions lacked the crucial element of learning - Michie&#x27;s BOXES.<p>Concurrently, Michie, exiled to Glasgow &amp; private industry, found great success helping the Japanese revolutionise the assembly line &amp; in the US with automated factory control &amp; satellite piloting for NASA. All reinforcement learnt using BOXES but he &amp; AI were pariah in the UK as he laments in 1987:<p>[Michie from 18:24] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;iplayer&#x2F;episode&#x2F;p0306rt1&#x2F;micro-live-series-3-28031987" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;iplayer&#x2F;episode&#x2F;p0306rt1&#x2F;micro-live-ser...</a><p>Michie&#x27;s nascent hybrid of raw sensor machine learning &amp; GOFAI embodied in robots is just being rediscovered in Abeel &amp; Levines work today. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1504.00702" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1504.00702</a><p>An AI winter is a terrible thing. Progress lost decades. Tragically the 2002 fire may have destroyed Michie&#x27;s undigitised archive.