Donald Michie, who together with his second wife, the embryologist Anne McLaren, has been killed in a motoring accident, was a scientist of rare distinction: cryptologist, animal geneticist and a champion of the UK’s pioneering efforts in robotics and artificial intelligence.

He was a close friend of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who played a critical role in the development of the modern digital computer, and whom he met while helping to unravel German military codes at Bletchley Park, the wartime cryptography centre. Their discussions on machine learning and games theory underpinned much of Michie’s later work as professor of machine intelligence at Edinburgh University where he developed Frederick, a robot capable of identifying components from a jumbled heap and assembling them into a predetermined structure. At the time, it was one of the most advanced examples of robotics anywhere in the world.