The British Bill Gates finds a formula for bad times

David Crow

16 May 2009

David Crow meets Mike Lynch, the computer scientist whose firm, Autonomy, makes software that knows how humans think — and can spot when they’re committing fraud

The plush Piccadilly offices of Autonomy are decorated with complex mathematical equations, written in buzzing neon lights and frosted onto glass doors. Although the formulas underpin technology that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago, they were first penned by an 18th-century vicar, Thomas Bayes, who spent his life trying to prove the existence of God through mathematics. ‘He never succeeded,’ Autonomy founder and chief executive Mike Lynch tells me, ‘although he probably has an answer by now.’

Autonomy has taken so-called Bayesianism and built technology that enables computers to understand human interaction. Its software can sift through emails and telephone calls and, using algorithms, work out what they mean. It is, according to Lynch, a huge departure from established thinking in the tech- nology sector.

‘The idea that has surrounded the development of the computer is that computers aren’t clever enough to deal with the real world,’ he explains. ‘So you have to take the world and simplify it, lay it out in rows and columns, in ones and zeros, in black and white. But the real world is far more colourful and interesting than that.’

Lynch, now 43, began work on the maths that underpins Autonomy’s software in the early 1990s, when he was writing his post-doctoral thesis at Cambridge University. He was by no means alone in trying to teach computers to understand human communication, but he took a different path to most.

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