It’s thinking about things in computational terms, so thinking about… given a question, trying to formulate it with the kinds of thinking that you could talk to a smart computer about.

You have this giant display on your wall of a rhinoceros. I’m thinking about how do I make that rhinoceros computational? I’ll give you an example: it’s got a couple of horns at the front. One question would be, what’s the diversity of rhinoceros horns? How do I think about the space of shapes of rhinoceros horns? That’s something which we can then engage with computationally. If that’s the signature of a rhinoceros, is the shape of its horn or something, then we can say there’s the space of sames, and maybe there are actually sub-breeds of rhinoceros that are separated from other ones because their horns are a different shape and so on. This is how you start engaging with some questions about the world computationally.