William Tunstall-Pedoe

William Tunstall-Pedoe FREng^[2] (born January 1969) is a British entrepreneur and computer scientist focussed on Artificial Intelligence. He was the founder and CEO of Evi (formerly True Knowledge),^[3] a pioneering Voice Assistant, Semantic search and Question answering startup, and following the acquisition of Evi by Amazon was a key member of the team that built and launched Amazon Alexa.^[4][5][1] He is currently the founder and CEO of Unlikely AI,^[6] a British start-up focussed on producing safe, general intelligence using Neurosymbolic methods.^[7]

Tunstall-Pedoe was born into a family of medical professional in Dulwich^[8] and moved to Scotland when he was 13 years old where he wrote commercial software for a business run by the computer teacher at High School of Dundee.^[8][1] He subsequently studied Computer Science at Churchill College University of Cambridge.

Tunstall-Pedoe has been an angel investor and advisor to numerous startup companies,^[9] including working as a fellow at Creative Destruction Lab at the Rotman School of Management and Said Business School

In 2010 Tunstall-Pedoe calculated that Sunday, 11 April 1954, was the most boring day in history.^[10][11]

Tunstall-Pedoe created an AI anagram generated application called Anagram Genius that turned any text into relevant anagrams. Dan Brown used the software to create the anagrams that were integral to the plot of the The Da Vinci Code novel and his name appears in the acknowledgements of all 80 million copies sold. The same anagrams were used in the The Da Vinci Code (film)^[12][13]

Tunstall-Pedoe was the developer of Cyber Chess published by The Fourth Dimension - an early commercial chess-playing program where the weights were tuned with a Genetic Algorithm^[14]