Many of the great advances in modern computer programming are attributable to Donald Michie, who died on 7 July, 2007 aged 83 in a car accident which also claimed the life of his ex-wife, Dame Anne McLaren .

Although formally trained as a geneticist, Mr Michie became highly respected as a leading pioneer in artificial intelligence and early computer programming.

His groundbreaking work at Bletchley Park introduced Mr Michie to his great influence Alan Turing , who sparked his passion for artificial intelligence.

He will be remembered for his key role in the development of early computer systems, responsible for bringing robots, interactive computer games and primitive search engines into the world.

Donald Michie was born on 11 November, 1923 in Burma. He attended Rugby School and won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford.

In 1943 Bletchley Park recruited him as a cryptographer, working on the highly sensitive "Tunny" machine. His colleague Alan Turing sparked Mr Michie’s interest in artificial intelligence and he helped devise a new computer program that could decipher messages in hours instead of weeks.

In 1946, he returned to Oxford University and gained his MA, Dphil, and DSc degrees in mammalian genetics and other biological sciences. He continued to pursue his passion for AI and in 1960 devised MENACE, one of the first programs capable of learning a perfect game of Tic-Tac-Toe.

In 1965, he was appointed director of the new Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at Edinburgh University. In 1968, Michie invented the memoization computing technique that could speed up programs by storing the results of function calls instead of running them afresh every time.

He undertook pioneering work on robots, unveiling FREDERICK in 1973. The machine was highly teachable, identifying and assembling selected components from a random pile. As a result, Mr Michie accurately predicted that robots would be "doing boring production line jobs in an entire factory".

He developed Expert-Ease in 1983. The program could produce explanations when fed little fragments of information – for example it was able to solve a chess problem giving only 15 wrong answers in 200,000 tests.

Although he officially retired from Edinburgh University in 1984, taking the title Professor Emeritus, Mr Michie’s career continued to prosper. He founded the Turing Institute and lectured on artificial intelligence at universities throughout Britain, America and the USSR.

The car crash in which Mr Michie died also claimed the life of his fellow passenger and ex-wife, Dame Anne McLaren. He was married three times and is survived by two sons and two daughters.

Mr Michie was awarded many honours for his contributions to artificial intelligence, including the 1995 Achievement Medal of the Institution of Electrical engineers and the 2001 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence. He was a founding Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence.

His work at Bletchley Park greatly contributed to the Allies’ success. After developing the Colossus 2 in 1944, the British built 8 more machines, which had decrypted 63 million characters of German messages by the end of the war.

Keen to communicate his work, Mr Michie was founder and editor–in-chief of the Machine Intelligence series between 1967 to 2000. Publications included ‘On Machine Intelligence’ (1974/1986) and ‘The Creative Computer’ (1984).

He was a visionary who predicted the internet in 1968: "Along with question-answering services, which will allow us to inquire about the restaurants in our locality or politics in Paraguay, will come the games opponent, the puzzle setter and the quiz master".