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  • Reflecting Back on the Lighthill Affair
  • Maarten van Emden (bio)

M any readers ofthe Annals may never have heard of the 1973 Lighthill Affair. Yet it was an Affair in the sense of the Dreyfus and Profumo Affairs. Even though scaled down to the teacup size, it was big enough to make it into a textbook published twenty years later:

. . . the Lighthill Report, which formed the basis for the decision by the British government to end support of AI research in all but two universities. (Oral tradition paints a somewhat different and more colorful picture, with political ambitions and personal animosities that cannot be put into print.) 1

In this paper, I describe the affair, put in print some of the things hinted at here, and elaborate on the issues that have remained topical.

I first heard the word "Lighthill" in November 1972, soon after I started my research fellowship with the Department of Machine Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. As Jean Michie said to me: "What, you haven't heard of Lighthill? That man who wants to do away with us?" I had not, but before long I learned that Jean was right about his wanting to do away with the Department of Machine Intelligence and, what was more, about his having the clout to bring this about.

The "Lighthill" referred in the conversation with Jean came to mean the publication of a report, followed by a televised debate 2at the Royal Institution in London. The proceedings gave the impression of a movie Crown Prosecutor presenting of his case. Sir James Lighthill, FRS, Lucasian Professor at Cambridge University pronounces from behind a lectern on a platform elevated above the other participants of the debate, seated in the pit below: Donald Michie, John McCarthy, and Richard Gregory. The debate was actually only the second half of the proceedings; the first half consisted of an oration by Lighthill standing on his platform. Science policy or theater?

At the time the Department of Machine Intelligence, Michie's creation, had become a world center of artificial intelligence (AI). To give you an idea, I will list (as far as memory serves) visitors to the department I met there. 3A year later the Department of Machine Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh was reduced to three people: Donald Michie, Professor of Machine Intelligence, one secretary, and one technician. The remainder [End Page 119]joined the newly created Department of Artificial Intelligence or left for jobs elsewhere. All this on the basis of the report of a single person who was ignorant of the research area. It is extraordinary that a body dispensing public funds, such as the UK Science Research Council, could have proceeded in this manner.

If a report was necessary, it should have been written by an American expert. Only in the US there was a sufficient depth of expertise. Moreover, the search for a British expert would have been complicated by the difficulty of finding someone not connected via the old boy network. Not only was the reporting "expert" British, but also the old boy connection was present with a vengeance: Lighthill was one of, what I shall call, "The Winchester Four," described in an interview with Freeman Dyson:

IOPScience:

You excelled in mathematics at school. Were those happy days?

Freeman Dyson:

Yes, on the whole. We were very lucky because everything was screwed up by the war [World War II]—I remember in my last year at Winchester having only seven hours of classes a week. It was wonderful—we were free to get our own education. The teaching was fairly good, but didn't make much difference—we learned much more from each other than we did from the teachers. There were four of us, who were about the same age, who became fellows of the Royal Society—the Longuet-Higgins brothers, Sir James Lighthill and I.

The Winchester Four stayed close in their interests: all became mathematical physicists. All four became Fellows of the Royal Society. If there would have been something like Nobel Nominees, then Freeman Dyson and Christopher Longuet–Higgins would have been among those; Dyson in quantum electrodynamics and Longuet–Higgins...

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