I was already thinking about making knowledge computable back when I was at Eton more than 40 years ago. For a long time I thought the only way to make a system like that would be to build something that basically emulates a brain. But as a result of a bunch of basic science I did in the 1990s, I realized that wasn’t true, and that one could build Wolfram|Alpha using computation, and some ideas from the science I developed. I wasn’t sure it was going to work, but I’m happy to say it has…