The Young Explorers

Marco Barnig, a Luxembourgish telecommunications engineer and one of the country's early innovators in artificial intelligence, has passed away at the age of 75. He died peacefully last Saturday, 11 July, in Canchy, France.[1]

Barnig earned his engineering degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. He later worked at Post Luxembourg, where he helped introduce new technologies within the organisation. He was already experimenting with microprocessors in the 1970s. Among other achievements, he built a machine that could play the game of Mill against a human opponent. He once described it to the Luxemburger Wort as his first AI project.[1]

The 1970s. While most of the world was still figuring out calculators, a telecommunications engineer in Luxembourg was building a machine that could play a board game against a human. The game of Mill is a strategy game, older than chess in some cultures, played on a grid of intersecting lines. The machine could play it. The machine was, by Barnig's own account, his first AI project.[1]

KI-Léierbud

After retiring, Barnig devoted much of his time to exploring artificial intelligence. He launched the KI-Léierbud initiative and published Luxembourg's first children's book written entirely by AI. Inspired by his five grandchildren, he created "The Young Explorers" ("Les Jeunes Explorateurs, Sur les Sentiers du Patrimoine UNESCO"), which invites readers to discover 100 UNESCO World Heritage sites.[1]

Barnig explained at the time that he wanted to leave his grandchildren a lasting memory for when he would no longer be there. He was 75. He had built his first AI in the 1970s. He published his last book using AI. He started with a machine that played Mill. He ended with a book that explored 100 UNESCO sites for his grandchildren. The technology changed. The impulse did not.[1]

He died on 11 July, the day the heatwave was at its peak. The news came on 17 July, the day the heatwave broke. In between, the country burned and the rivers ran dry and the fire services went out 75,814 times and the government unveiled seven measures to revive construction and the pension fund paid out €7.36 billion. And a man who built his first AI in the 1970s died quietly in France, and the news arrived six days later, and it was not the biggest story of the week, and it was not the most urgent, and it was the one that will last the longest.[1]