This is a fantastic eyewitness account by someone who really understands the material and people involved.<p>I am glad to see Donald Michie&#x27;s rightful place as a pioneer of UK re-inforcement learning and robotics at Edinburgh asserted.<p>Inventor of memoisation, his BOXES algorithm was flying spaceships by reinforcement learning in the early 1980s.<p>Michie&#x27;s first AI was famously made from matchboxes and beads before there was even a PDP-11 at Edinburgh - but it could learn to play naughts and crosses well - he understood learning and computation theoretically from his conversations with Good and Turing when they worked together.<p>Popplestone and Burstall&#x27;s POP-II was the UK&#x27;s: even more functional; even less brackets LISP of choice and Freddy-II was ahead of anything else.<p>Lighthill arguably gave the 1980&#x27;s assembly line to the Japanese, Michie had it 10 years earlier but the British establishment, literally shut him out.