This blog post accompanies the ˜UnEarthed: the Power of Gardening" exhibition at the British Library at St Pancras, 2 May-10 August 2025.

Around the Poet's Circle at the British Library's St Pancras site a wildflower meadow sprung up just a few days before the opening of the "UnEarthed: the Power of Gardening" exhibition. Fig.1.

Figure 1 The wildflower meadow around the Poet's Circle with the Planets, viewed from the Pigott Conference Centre's large porthole, British Library, St Pancras,10 July 2025

 Many of the plants and animals featured in the exhibition's rare old books can now be seen in their breathing beauty in the meadow as well. Fig. 2, 3, 4, 11.

Figure 2 Sunflower at the exhibition and the meadow. Note the Latin name, "Flos Solis maior" is different from its scientific name used today: Helianthus annuus L. 1753. The L stands for Linnaeus who named this species according to his binomial nomenclature, and published the name and description in 1753. Basilius Besler, Hortus Eystettensis. Altdorf, 1613. 10.Tab.28. Unlike on the painting, Sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) in the meadow are rarely seen without various pollinators, 25 June 2025

 

Figure 3 Cornflower at the exhibition and the meadow. Cornflower on display at the Unearthed exhibition: Blue Cornflower (Centaurea cyanus) in Mary Matilda Howard, Wild Flowers and their Teachings. Bath, 1848. C.27.k.11. Cornflower (Centaurea cyanus) in the meadow, 25 June 2025

Soon after Global Generation, an education charity, rolled out the "instant meadow", more bees, butterflies (for example, Large White (Pieris brassicae), Small White (Pieris Rapae), Gatekeeper (Pyronia tihonus), Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta), Humming-bird Hawk Moth (Macroglossum stellatarum)), bumblebees, dragonflies, and flies appeared around the Poet's Circle than seen before. In front of our eyes, this small wildflower patch has become part of the integrated network of green areas through the green corridors around The British Library. Fig. 4.

Figure 4 Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta) in a book,1634, at the Unearthed exhibition and out in the wildflower meadow, 28 June 2025. Although not named, the black and white drawing and the description (in Latin) in Moffet, T., Wotton, E., Gessner, C., Penny, T. 1634. Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum, page 100 identifies the Red Admiral.1471.k.8 and 2nd revised edition in 2012: YK.2013.b.5764 and Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Could this instant biodiversity enrichment be sustained?

To explore this question, it might be useful to look at the context.

The wildflower meadow was planned to replace the Box (Buxus sempervirens).

The Box hedge was planted around the time when the British Library's St Pancras building opened its doors to readers. Two photos, one published at the official opening, on 25 June 1998, and the other at the installation of Anthony Gormley's "Planets" sculptures in 2002 show the evergreen Box providing a soft architectural contrast to the Poet's Circle limestone.

The Box, well-known for its low-maintenance and preference for dry conditions but less appreciated for its support for pollinators, thrived for decades.

Since 2022, the Box, however, has lost its shine. Most of the leaves turned inwards, spun by the hungry caterpillars of the Box-tree Moth (Cydalima perspectalis), and dropped. Fig.5.

Figure 5 The caterpillar of the Box-tree Moth (Cydalima perspectalis) 23 April 2024 and imago, white, 27 June 2023, and melanic form, 29 April 2024

The Box Moth imago is easy to recognize by its white wings with a dark band; although dark, melanic, forms are also not uncommon. The Box Moth, first recorded in the UK in 2007, travelled with the international horticultural trade from Asia to Europe. The Royal Horticultural Society's page dedicated to the Box-tree caterpillar maintains a citizen science survey that enables gardeners to learn more about the moths' spreading and report new sightings.

The Box showed remarkable resilience to caterpillar damage: several new shoots appeared in the spring 2025. Not enough, though, to change the decision that the Box would be cut and replaced by a wildflower meadow. Fig. 6.

Figure 6 New shoots of Box, on the dry shrub, defoliated by the Box-tree Moth's caterpillar, 14 March 2025, and Box cut above ground level, 1 April 2025,

The decision is explained in Chapter 1.9 Green spaces and biodiversity of the British Library Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy 2024-30.

Removing the Box happened in two phases. First, the trunks were cut above ground level, then the roots were dug out by hard manual labour with axes. Fig. 7.

Figure 7 Karari, Keir & Andrew, Global Generation Volunteers are removing cut Box Trees, 1 April 2025 and Fran Reeves, Head of Gardens, Global Generation, is removing the roots of Box Trees, 7 April 2025

While removing the Box hedge, the Global Generation team found no evidence of any bird nest in the dead trees. Birds often seen visiting the Boxes earlier, for example Blackbird (Turdus merula), Blue Tit (Cyanistes coeruleus), Great Tit (Parus major), Wren (Troglodytes troglodytes), Robin (Erithacus rubecula) and Pied Wagtail (Motacilla alba yarellii), were there to feed, picking up Box Tree Moth caterpillars and other insects.

No bird nests but plenty of rubbish turned up from the ground under the Box, with occasional piles of feather left after predation. An eclectic collection of items, including bones, chewed watering pipes and the unmissable musky scent made it probable that the Box was also a hiding place for Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes). Only a few live animals were spotted under the Box. The most eye-catching were the Brown-lipped Snails (Cepaea nemoralis), also called Lemon Snails. Fig. 8.

Figure 8 Under the cut Box: lots of rubbish ,1 April 2025; a large bone from a Red Fox hiding place, 24 April 2025, and several live Brown-lipped or Lemon Snails (Cepaea nemoralis), 1 April 2025

Uprooting the Box has also brought up a few earthworms but much less than expected. The soil appeared to be rather impoverished; it had never been mulched since the hedge had gone in. Areas of the soil had become sunken over time. Whilst this would appear to be an issue, for many wildflower plant species a poor soil is ideal. Where soils were low and needed to be replenished, Global Generation utilised their community network by obtaining donations of poor quality Kings Cross soil from local residents' growing areas which was not going to be used, and placing these into the Poet's Circle, ensuring circular economy principles were upheld, giving the meadow species the stony, free-draining soil they liked. Global Generation gave the soil donors a nutrient dense homemade compost to grow their vegetables in instead. A happy swap for all parties.

Having removed the Box, 200 square meters of "ready-made" wildflower meadow turf was placed atop the soil, just like rugs. Fig. 9, 10.

 

Figure 9 Wildflower turf arrived at St Pancras. The very first pieces of wildflower meadow turf laid with careful and hard manual work, 24 April 2025.

Turf, as a product, is rather malleable. It is easy to cut and create a garden with in very short time. It is ideal when a tight timeframe limits other possibilities.

Figure 10 The terrace under Anne Frank's tree (featured right): bare soil on 24 April 2025 and a flower meadow on 1 July 2025

The wildflower turf was purchased from a London-based gardening company, London Lawn Turf Company. Three different, site-specific turf types were selected in an effort to get as many native species as possible in 200 square meters.

The three different types of turfs were laid down in three different locations:
(1) Wildflower Landscape Turf under Anne Frank's tree
(2) Wildflower SuDS Turf for the area around the Goat Willow (Salix caprea) where plants do not mind having their roots in water (SuDS: sustainable urban drainage system)
(3) Wildflower Native Enriched Turf for the rest.

The lists of grass and flower species for each turf type are accessible on the company's website linked above. The three lists have a core set with site-specific additions. According to the company, the selected wildflower turfs could produce as many as 34-55 species over the seasons.

While not listed, not only plants arrived, but many other life forms entangled in the roots, under the leaves, on the stalks, in the soil, including fungi, bacteria, mosses, worms, molluscs, woodlouse, beetles, spiders etc. They are part of the meadow, they contribute to making the meadow a meadow, a constantly changing and adapting living community; they are going to influence wildlife around St Pancras and vice-versa. For the survival of the meadow what matters is how these different life-forms could live and adapt together, not their provenance, whether they are native or introduced, intentionally planted or self-seeded. Fig. 11.

Figure 11 Nightshades in the exhibition and out in the meadow. The first English description of the potato in John Gerard, A general history of plants, London, 1597.35.g.13-14. Potatoes, one of the best known members of the nightshade family, have their self-seeded relatives in the BL meadow, attracting a variety of pollinators: Bittersweet (Solanum dulcamara) and Black Nightshade (Solanum nigrum), 13 July 2025

Watering the turf just after being laid down was vital to ensure the plants and all the other living beings in the turf would survive. Vital is not an exaggeration: the lack of rainfall and the high temperature would have ruined the new meadow. According to the UK Meteorological Office, Spring 2025 has been the warmest and sunniest on record, since the measurement started in 1884. Fig. 12.

Figure 12 Watering the freshly laid wildflower turf was essential in a record breaking hot and dry spring, 24 April 2025, it helped to establish the meadow: Oxeye Daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare), 11 June 2025, Common Bird's-foot-trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) 25 June 2025

A few flowers were already in blossom when the turf arrived in early April, with Red Campion (Silene dioica) and Cowslip (Primula veris) being the most heart-warming . At the time of writing, mid-July, a colourful variety of flowers adorn the meadow: Oxeye-Daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare), Queen Anne's Lace (Daucus carota), Common Bird's-foot-trefoil (Lotus corniculatus), Common Poppy (Papaver rhoeas), Cornflower (Centaurea cyanus), Selfheal (Prunella vulgaris), Yarrow (Achillea millefolium), Corn Marigold (Glebionis segetum) and many more. Fig. 13.

Figure 13 Some of the early summer flowers: Queen Anne's Lace or Carrot (Daucus carota), 25 June 2025, Borage (Borago officinalis), 10 July 2025, and Red Campion (Silene dioica), 13 July 2025

While the eyes are drawn to colours, it is the various shades of greenness of grasses that dominate the meadow. One of the easiest to recognize species is Crested Dog's Tail (Cynosurus cristatus) which is now turning yellow. Fig. 15

In addition to laying turfs, Global Generations created islands of potted flowers, grown organically in the Story Garden from seeds specifically nurtured for this meadow. These islands are placed around "mini-beast habitats" and other structures, including the bare white-grey Box branches which were kept and built into the new landscape, serving a symbolic bridge between the past and the present garden. Fig.14.

Figure 14 Log-piles, one of them marked as mini beast habitat and the old Box branches in the new meadow contribute to texturing the meadow for a wide range of life forms, including one of the "mini beasts", the 7-Spot Ladybird (Coccinella septempunctata), 25 June 2025

The meadow's design allows various possibilities for the integration of the existing urban wildlife, resilient to heat and lack of water, and the new meadow. The integration takes time as it involves various life forms in their various life cycles to get to know each other, to live and to change together throughout the seasons.

So, returning to the opening question, how could this small artificial meadow at St Pancras be sustained?

Fran Reeves, Head of Gardens at Global Generations, the charity that designed and created the wildflower meadow around the Poets' Circle, shares her expertise related to watering, seeding, cutting and grazing the plants:

Very little watering is necessary. However, we should seek to save seeds from the meadow before cutting it in the autumn. Seed sovereignty, particularly in our urban environments, is an extremely important way of encouraging diversity in species and building advocacy for the importance of these plants being in our urban spaces, for human and non-human benefit. There is also a rather novel idea of us, gardeners, being able to graze animals on this meadow, something the local wildlife such as birds and small mammals have already been benefitting from doing via the rich species on offer.

Global Generations runs the Story Garden, a community-garden, which is also featured at the Unearthed exhibition.

While this story makes it obvious that the meadow at St Pancras is not a natural meadow, it is important to recall that even "natural" meadows are not natural. They are semi-natural as they are created and sustained by human interventions: cutting the grass and having the meadow grazed regularly. According to landscape historian Prof. Oliver Rackham it could have taken some 150 years to develop an iconic wildflower meadow ^{[1, page 139]}. During this long period an intricate web of life developed and adapted to live together. Without hay-cutting and/or grazing by animals, domestic or wild, meadows would turn to woodland. Fig. 15.

Figure 15 Crested Dog's Tail (Cynosurus cristatus) was the first flowering grass in our meadow, 2 June 2025. After producing seeds, the grasses and the flowers of meadow will be cut in the autumn. A painting displayed at the very entrance of the Unearthed exhibition shows the practice of cutting a flowery meadow for hay at the early 16th century. Calendar miniatures for March and July, attributed to Simon Bening, France, about 1500-25. Add. MS 18855

 If you are keen to read more about meadows, how they respond to different treatments (hay cutting, grazing, fertilizing) and the classification of meadows, you may want to consult volume three of the three-volume opus British Plant Communities edited by John S. Rodwell^[2]. You will not find, however, urban meadows in the classification. Urban "instant meadows", created by laying wildflower turf, such as our one, constitute a new community even if their species composition mimics those of the old, grazed hay meadows.

Creating a small meadow in central London, dry, hot, and near one of London's most polluted major roads, Euston Road, is nothing short of an experiment.

Yet, this experiment offers important learning opportunities. Two highlighted here. First, learning about the meadow's flora and fauna through direct experience, in addition to reading about them, recreates deep connections between urban dwelling people and their fellow-creatures. Second, learning from our meadow, especially its changes over time, could become part of our exploration of how "instant" wildflower meadows could contribute to biodiversity-inclusive urban planning, increasing the quality and area of urban green spaces and their connectivity, aims expressed in Target 12 of Annex A of the UK's National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan.

Andrea Deri, Cataloguer, British Library, and Fran Reeves, Head of Gardens, Global Generation. All photographs by Andrea Deri

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to the Global Generation volunteers for their hard work to create the meadow at St Pancras, and the British Library Estate Team for their wide range of support without which this blog post could not have happened, from providing data to ensuring safe access to the meadow for wildlife monitoring.

References

[1] Rackham, O., 2003. The illustrated history of the countryside. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London. pp 119-141 Grassland and Heath. BL shelfmark YK.2004.a.3231

[2] Rodwell, J.S. (Ed.), 1991. British plant communities. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Volume 3 Grasslands and Montane Communities. BL shelfmark m00/18115

There aren’t many sci-fi movies as cleverly written and executed as the 1983 Hollywood classic WarGames, directed by John Badham and written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes. But it might not have been as good as it is if not for the input of the British AI scientist Donald Michie (1923-2007) and his knowledge of game-learning machines, especially computers that can play noughts and crosses.

Who was Donald Michie?

Donald Michie was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park (BP) during the second world war; after the war, a geneticist and later an artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer who founded the first department for machine intelligence in the world at the University of Edinburgh. He made significant contributions to all three fields that he worked in and was instrumental in institutionalising AI and machine learning (ML) research in the UK, and abroad.

A major part of his AI research focused on machines that could play games. However, one of his most famous achievements in this subfield of AI is MENACE (Machine Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine), a mechanical computer made of matchboxes and beads that could learn to play noughts and crosses. MENACE is now considered one of the first working examples of, what ML researchers call, reinforcement learning. This eventually led to the development of the BOXES algorithm by Michie and R. A. Chambers for learning of dynamic systems.

Therefore, it is no surprise that Universal Studios reached out to him when working on WarGames.

Dangerous games

If you haven’t seen it, be warned that there will be spoilers ahead.

WarGames tells the story of a young computer hacker, David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) who accidentally gains access to a US military supercomputer that controls the launch of nuclear warheads. He starts playing games with it thinking that it’s a game-playing machine, which makes the supercomputer run real war-game simulations and almost launch the nuclear warheads. Fortunately, Lightman, along with Prof. Stephen Falken (John Wood), the scientist who designed the supercomputer, makes it play a game of noughts and crosses against itself, which leads the machine to conclude that a Third World War involving nuclear warheads cannot be won, thus stopping it from launching the missiles.

It might be an exaggeration to call it sci-fi as it hits a little too close to reality than most sci-fi movies would. Although there is no public record of any supercomputer malfunctioning and almost launching nuclear warheads to start a world war, there have been a few mishaps in United States alone that have almost caused nuclear detonations, and one incident in 1983 when a Soviet early warning system gave a false alarm of a missile launch by the US.

The fear of the Cold War escalating to a direct nuclear war was alive and well when WarGames was released. However, that was only a part of the reason why the movie became a box office success and a cult classic. It was the presence of an ‘intelligent’ supercomputer that could play games and treat global thermonuclear war as a game, and act on its own to potentially end the world as we know it, that made WarGames such a compelling film.

Michie’s concern

WarGames tapped into a real concern that was prevalent at that time, regarding the increasing inscrutability and influence of large computers that were being used by big companies and government organisations for various purposes. This was something that Michie too was very concerned about and he points out in his correspondence regarding the script consultancy with Universal Studios:

We are all in danger from the current emergence of super-computers inscrutable to man. Very few are yet alert to the seriousness and nature of the peril.

This is not surprising coming from Michie, who had already been discussing the social risks of AI for over a decade by this point. In fact, he was the one who organised the first global conference on the social impact of AI in 1972 at Serbelloni in Italy¹. In the years since then, Michie had raised some of his concerns regarding increasingly complex and sophisticated computers in several publications despite being a pioneer in the field. It makes sense why he was enthusiastic to collaborate on this sci-fi movie project, which was initially titled The Genius.

Main suggestions

“WarGames Correspondence with Universal Studios”, 1981. (Add MS 88958/3/54). Reproduced with permission of the estate of Donald Michie.

In his correspondence, Michie points out five pages worth of technical inaccuracies in the draft script. Most of them are small details regarding the terminologies that are spoken about and technical issues in how the technology is used in various scenes. Michie recommended a lot of minor changes, for instance using the term “printer” instead of “teleprinter,” which was no longer used among the computing community by the 1980s. However, he also pointed out major technical errors, such as that a program once terminated would not have a fragment of itself accidentally re-animated when the computer goes online as was shown in one of the scenes in the draft script.

Although some of Michie’s minor suggestions have been taken into account by the scriptwriters, we can see that most of the technical inaccuracies he pointed out are still there in the final cut of the movie. This includes the premise of Michie’s main suggestion: to consider changing the climax sequence where the machine is self-playing a 3-in-a-row noughts and crosses to “learn” that it’s a game that cannot be won. Michie recommended changing it a game called 5-IN-A-ROW (sometimes called Peggity) as it would take much longer for the computer to self-learn how to play compared to noughts and crosses, which can be learned by a fast computer within seconds. This, in his view, would make the long climax sequence where the computer is learning to play the game more realistic. Moreover, Michie pointed out that the supercomputer “would try to establish the ‘no win’ property by logical proof,” rather than brute-forcing through various playing strategies as is shown in the movie. He states that a computer as sophisticated as the one shown in the movie would not use a ‘try everything’ strategy to learn how to play a game.

Crucial contribution to the script

However, one key suggestion of Michie’s that was taken into account by the studio and the scriptwriters was the technique by which David and Prof. Falken make the computer play itself. In the draft script given to Michie, the computer “somehow” starts self-playing, presumably without a prompt. Michie suggested changing the number of players to “zero” to make the computer play itself. This is what happens in the movie.

Michie also recommends changing the way the supercomputer abruptly stops trying to guess the launch codes of the missiles, as it was in the draft script. He instead suggests that the filmmakers show the computer generalise from the self-play sequence that ‘nuclear wars are not winnable’ and apply this to terminate the war game it was playing. He recommends David or someone else instructing the computer to do this, although this was not taken into account. In the film, the computer automatically generalises from the noughts and crosses self-playing that various real-world nuclear war-game simulations all end up with no winners.

Although Michie’s main suggestion to change the 3-in-a-row game to 5-in-a-row was ignored by the filmmakers, he himself points out in the correspondence that it is not necessary to fix this as ‘there is a risk of distracting from the gripping simplicity of the ending by fussing over side-issues.’ It shows his concern for how well laypeople could receive the movie and its main theme of the futility of nuclear war, rather than focusing too much on the technical inaccuracies or inconsistencies in the script.

Aswin Valsala Narayanan

The Donald Michie Papers at the British Library comprise two separate tranches of material gifted to the Library in 2004 and 2008. They contain correspondence, notes, notebooks, offprints and photographs and are available to researchers.

Aswin Valsala Narayanan is as PhD student at the University of Leeds and the British Library. He is on an WRoCAH Collaborative Doctoral Award researching the Donald Michie Archive, exploring Michie's work as an artificial intelligence researcher in post-war Britain.

[1] Rosamund Powell, “The ‘Artificial Intelligentsia’ and Its Discontents: An Exploration of 1970s Attitudes to the ‘Social Responsibility of the Machine Intelligence Worker,’” BJHS Themes, September 19, 2023, pp.1–15, https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2023.8.

There is a good chance that AI research in Britain would not have evolved the way it did had Alan Turing been a great chess player. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t hold a candle to the chess masters, such as Hugh Alexander and Harry Golombek, who were in his Enigma codebreaking team at Bletchley Park (BP). As per one account, Turing once played himself into such a mess that his opponent Golombek turned the board around and tried to save the game for him.

However, Turing’s mediocrity in chess proved to be a blessing for one of the youngest codebreakers at BP, Donald Michie, who was just 18-years-old when he was recruited to the Government Code and Cypher School. Despite having no mathematical background, he proved to be a quick learner and eventually became a key member of Testery — Major Ralph Tester’s team attempting to break the ‘Fish’ codes using manual hand methods. It was during his time at Testery that he met and befriended Turing, who had developed Turingery — one of the manual methods used by codebreakers of Testery.

Donald Michie c. 1974 (Add MS 89072/1/5). Reproduced with permission of the estate of Donald Michie.

While Turing was no match for his chessmaster teammates, in young Michie, he found a partner who could give him a competitive game. They met every week at a pub in Wolverton not too far away from BP. This friendship and weekly chess session proved to be life-changing for Michie.

According to Michie, their conversations invariably centred around ideas of learning machines and mechanising chess, ideas formative to his interest and eventual career in machine intelligence.

Turing and Michie remained friends after the war.

Post-war games and game-playing machines

In the period of 1947-48, Michie and the mathematician Shaun Wylie, another colleague at BP, developed a chess-playing algorithm, or a machine on paper — a ‘paper machine’, so to speak. This was basically a collection of machine-rules to decide the next move using the opponent’s move as input. The ‘MACHIAVELLI’ (so named after creators Michie and Wylie), was created independently of the paper-machine that Turing and his friend David Champernowne developed, named ‘TUROCHAMP.’

I. J. ‘Jack’ Good, who was friends with both Michie and Turing, too took part in the BP discussions of ‘chess-playing’ machines. In fact, Jack Copeland notes that Good recalls Turing speaking about the concept of mechanizing chess in 1941, before Michie’s time at BP. Like Michie, Good was interested in both chess and ‘learning’ machines. He was an excellent chess player apart from being a brilliant mathematician. Good was aware of the challenge that Michie and Wylie made to Turing and Champerowne’s chess-machine, and suggested a way in which MACHIAVELLI could be beaten in a letter he wrote to Turing in 1948:

I visited Oxford last week-end. Donald showed me a 'chess machine' invented by Shaun and himself. It suffers from the very serious disadvantage that it does not analyse more than one move ahead. I am convinced that such a machine could play a very poor game, however accurately it scored the position with respect to matter and space. In fact it could easily be beaten by playing 'psychologically', i.e. by taking into account the main weakness of the machine. This could be done by deliberately complicating the position and entering into combinations.

The correspondences show how the discussions on mechanizing chess from the BP years, evolved during the post-war period. However, these were not just the result of Michie and Turing’s acquaintance with chess players during their time at BP.

They were also shaped very much by the kind of codebreaking work they were involved in.

Colossus [c 1944]. The first-of-its-kind digital codebreaking was used for ‘guided’ searches to break German messages encoded using the Lorenz teleprinter cipher. (c) Crown copyright

 Both Michie’s and Turing’s chess-playing machines involved taking the opponent’s move as input and then creating an output move in response. Both of the algorithms involved ‘searching’ for a good move after considering various possible single moves by ranking them based on variables such as the safety of the piece, and the value of opponent’s pieces that could be captured. This was a guided search for ‘moves’ or ‘solutions’ using an evaluating – or ‘heuristic’ – function to narrow the number of possibilities rather than completing an exhaustive general search through all possible moves. It was conceptually very similar to the machine-aided searches that codebreakers at BP had to conduct to break the German ciphers. Michie’s job, being a key member of Newmanry team that broke the Lorenz cipher using the digital codebreaking machine Colossus, was to come up with solutions to narrow down the daily codebreaking searches of the machines. Such a problem-solving technique that uses a heuristic function to estimate hopeful paths to a solution would eventually be termed as "heuristic search". Michie himself would go on to make a significant contribution to developing and popularising this computational technique during the 1960s with his graph traverser program co-developed with J. E. Doran.

Going through Michie’s archives, we can find that research into chess-machines remained relevant to his entire machine intelligence and AI research career, even during the period that he worked as a geneticist. For instance, during the 1950s he had played MACHIAVELLI against biologist John Maynard Smith’s SOMA (Smith’s One-Move Analyser) in matchup refereed by Maynard Smith’s eldest son. A detailed description of how the machines performed was given in the 1961 New Scientist that Michie wrote together with Maynard Smith: ‘Machines that play games’.

Importance of chess to AI and machine learning

Chess became central to Michie’s research in the 1970s, when his research program was curtailed by the University of Edinburgh in the aftermath of the Lighthill Report that drastically defunded AI research in the UK. Chess endgames research was something Michie could work on with the limited funding he had post-Lighthill. However, for Michie, chess was not just a convenient and playful way to engage his interest in machine intelligence, as he clearly puts it in a 1980 draft titled ‘A representation for pattern knowledge in chess end-games’. In it, he addresses the question of whether those involved in computer chess are just ‘fooling around with the taxpayer’s money,’ and argues that ‘no other equally apposite material is readily available for investigating certain scientific issues of importance.’

This is also a point he emphasised in his 1966 paper, ‘Game-playing and game-learning automata’, referring to Turing’s interest in machines that could play games,:

It is sometimes thought that Turing’s interest in mechanised game playing was the spare time frivolity of a man who reserved his serious thoughts for worthier topics. That was not the case. He had the conviction that the development of high-speed digital computing equipment would make possible the mechanisation of human thought processes of every kind, and that games constituted an ideal model system in which studies of machine intelligence could first be developed.

Chess, for Michie, was the “fruit-fly” of AI research that was perfect for “studying the representation and measurement of knowledge in machines.’’ In another 1980 article ‘Chess with Computers’, he describes in detail why the strategic game is ideal for AI research and its “chief advantages”:

…chess constitutes a well-defined and formalized domain; it challenges the highest levels of intellectual capacity over a wide range of cognitive functions logical concept-formation, calculation, rote-learning, analogical thinking, deductive and inductive reasoning, and so forth; a detailed corpus of chess knowledge has accumulated over centuries in chess instructional works and commentaries; a generally accepted numerical scale for performance is available in the USCF rating system; and finally, the game can readily be decomposed into sub-games which can be subjected to intensive separate analysis.

Michie’s focus on chess-endgames research would eventually contribute to the development of the groundbreaking Iterative Dichotomiser 3 (ID3) learning algorithm for generating decision trees by J. Ross Quinlan, who was one of the many brilliant researchers Michie mentored during his career. In Quinlan’s 1986 paper, he acknowledges Michie’s role in the endeavour:

ID3 (Quinlan, 1979, 1983a) is one of a series of programs developed from CLS in response to a challenging induction task posed by Donald Michie, viz. to decide from pattern-based features alone whether a particular chess position in the King-Rook vs King-Knight endgame is lost for the Knight's side in a fixed number of ply.

This shows how chess shaped the fields of AI and machine learning; chess endgames research also played a key role in the projects of many of Michie’s PhD students from the 1970s and 80s, including Stephen Muggleton, Alan Shapiro and Tim Niblett’s pioneering work on induction methods in machine learning.

Nevertheless, the relationship between chess and AI research remains severely underexplored in the history of AI.

Posted by Aswin Valsala Narayanan

Further reading:

Donald Michie, “Alan Turing’s Mind Machines,” February 8, 2008, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7626.003.0005.

Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell, “Heuristic Problem Solving: The Next Advance in Operations Research,” Operations Research 6, no. 1 (1958): 1–10.

Donald Michie, “Game-Playing and Game-Learning Automata,” in Advances in Programming and Non-Numerical Computation (Elsevier, 1966), 183–200.

Donald Michie, “Chess with Computers,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 5, no. 3 (January 1, 1980): 215–27, https://doi.org/10.1179/isr.1980.5.3.215.

J. R. Quinlan, “Induction of Decision Trees,” Machine Learning 1, no. 1 (March 1, 1986): 81–106, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00116251.

The Donald Michie Papers at the British Library comprise two separate tranches of material gifted to the Library in 2004 and 2008. They contain correspondence, notes, notebooks, offprints and photographs and are available to researchers.

Aswin Valsala Narayanan is as PhD student at the University of Leeds and the British Library. He is on an WRoCAH Collaborative Doctoral Award researching the Donald Michie Archive, exploring Michie's work as an artificial intelligence researcher in post-war Britain.