The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements [pdf]

I am glad to see Donald Michie's rightful place as a pioneer of UK re-inforcement learning and robotics at Edinburgh asserted.

Inventor of memoisation, his BOXES algorithm was flying spaceships by reinforcement learning in the early 1980s.

Michie'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.

Popplestone and Burstall's POP-II was the UK's: even more functional; even less brackets LISP of choice and Freddy-II was ahead of anything else.

Lighthill arguably gave the 1980's assembly line to the Japanese, Michie had it 10 years earlier but the British establishment, literally shut him out.