Resumé

Education:

University: Cambridge University (Churchill College). I graduated with a First in my honours degree in Computer Science. I also did physics in my first year. An MA was awarded in 1995. (The knowledge I learned during my degree has been substantially reinforced by my part time teaching of the material in the years since.)

Before University I was educated at Dulwich College (London, England) and the High School of Dundee (Scotland). I was successful academically and my almost perfect exam results placed me in the top fifty students in the country. My early education had a very strong emphasis on the sciences and mathematics. I also studied subjects like French and English to an advanced level.

Contract and Other Work:

My work history can be summarised as the ongoing development and entrepreneurial exploitation of several large, extremely complicated and unusual software products which break new ground in artificial intelligence. I also have an extremely diverse range of experience relating to software development and the internet both from a technical and business perspective.

2005-present I am currently working full time as the CEO of True Knowledge. True Knowedge is the producer of a radical internet-based question-answering product. I have been developing the technology since 1998 and under my leadership the company has grown from one person to a staff of 23 and closed grant and seed funding, and over 2.5 million GBP in equity finance.

2004 The creation and launch of the crosswordtools.com website much of which involved creating online versions of previous software projects and overcoming implementation challenges (most of this work was subcontracted to others under my management).

1996-present Development of Crossword Maestro which breaks new ground in Artificial Intelligence. This software solves cryptic crossword clues and explains in plain English how the clues work. Before Crossword Maestro was written this task was regarded as something that was impossible for computers to do. Crossword Maestro is the only computer software ever written that can solve cryptic crossword clues by reading and understanding the clues.

As described above, an online version of Crossword Maestro was developed and launched in 2004. This involved lots of work on the code and a substantial new release of the technology. Some of the improvements are discussed here

1991-present Teaching computer science undergraduates at Cambridge University (various colleges). I teach a number of subjects including Datastructures and Algorithms and some of the heavy theoretical subjects.

1988-present Development of the Anagram Genius software. Although the purpose of the software is far from serious, the software engineering and AI techniques implemented within it are very sophisticated. Although a few people have written very simple anagram generating programs, none even begin to compare with the capabilities of this software (this is widely acknowledged). Most of the excellent anagrams discovered in the last ten years owe their existence to this creation. (Over twenty-five thousand of them can be found in the Anagram Genius archive.) The launch of the crosswordtools.com site brought an online/machine independent version backend. The anagram server on anagramgenius.com is also now powered online. The software also achieved some recent notability by being used by Dan Brown to discover the anagrams that appeared in The Da Vinci Code novel and movie. The novel is the best-selling book of recent times with fifty million copies in print. Skills: C++ software development, Artificial Intelligence, computer processing of words/language.

1995-1996 (and onwards) Marketing Anagram Genius and writing and promoting Anagram Genius the book. To promote these I have done upwards of fifty television and radio interviews as well as interviews with print journalists. Skills: Public Relations, television and radio interviews, software marketing, web site management and marketing.

1993/94 The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. This work was a mixture of system management (UNIX, PC, Novell, Mac), support for the participant mathematicians and developing the administrative database system which runs the Institute. The high point of my work there was witnessing Wiles announce his proof for Fermat's Last Theorem - the most famous previously-unsolved mathematics problem which was first posed in 1637. (The news made the front-page of almost every newspaper worldwide the next day.) Skills: UNIX, PC, Novell and Mac system management. dBase programming. Some familiarity with the various mathematics packages (Mathematica etc).

1992/93 I developed a complete commercial chess-playing program from scratch including a high quality chess engine, animated graphics, sound effects and a full state-of-the-art user interface. The product was marketed as Cyber Chess and published by The Fourth Dimension. A colour advertisement including screen shots can be seen here. This is still (2004) the definitive commercial chess-playing software for RISC OS. Skills: writing chess-playing software; getting computers to play intelligent games; a deep understanding of search algorithms and related issues; C programming; 3d graphics.

1991 IOTA Software (Cambridge, England). I developed a complete commercial tracing package in three months which converted raster/bitmap graphics into vector format. Skills: C programming, developing high-quality commercial software in a short period of time. Conversion of bitmap to vector format graphics.

1990 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (USA). I worked on the data-entry software for a large drugs project. I worked on writing software for data entry, report generation and receiving laboratory test data by modem. Skills: data-entry systems, building redundancy into software to make it reliable. C programming, Entry-point "logic" programming.

1989 Acorn Computers (Cambridge, England). Technical Support. Technical support by telephone and letter on all Acorn products (hardware and software) to dealers, educational users and end-users. In the three months I was there I wrote over a thousand technical support letters to customers all around the world. Skills: dealing effectively with customers of a large corporation, a full understanding of large company technical support issues.

1988 Division of Epidemiology, University of Minnesota (USA). I did a feasibility study into using portable computers for data-entry for use in large scale Epidemiological surveys. Skills: data-entry systems, the various skills necessary to tie up such a study, Turbo-Pascal was the language used.

1988 GEC Hirst Research Centre (London). Speech Recognition. I worked with writing software to recognise human speech. We took a feature-based approach and I did a lot of work with computer recognition of fricatives (the "noise-like" phonemes). Skills: C programming, speech recognition.

1987 GEC Hirst Research Centre (London). VLSI Process Architecture Research Laboratory. I worked on a research project using computers to simulate the manufacture of silicon devices in VLSI. This involved simulating dopant diffusion, the annealing processes etc. for various kinds of chips including radiation hard versions with insulator substrate for military use. I also wrote of suite of software which interfaced a French process simulator (TITAN) with GEC's device modelling software (MADMACS). Skills: FORTRAN, VMS, handling large quantities of source code written by large numbers of different people. Some solid state physics.

1983-1990 XOB. Numerous commercial software products developed and marketed often involving networking and Teletext. The skills for this are now dated as it involved writing software for the BBC and other 8-bit machines though some was moved to the RISC OS based Archimedes.

Publications:

Anagram Genius. Hodder and Stoughton. 1995. Authors. William Tunstall-Pedoe and Donald L. Holmes.

Genetic Algorithms Optimising Evaluation Functions. Journal of the International Computer Chess Association (ICCA), 1991, Vol 14. No. 3 pp119-128. William Tunstall-Pedoe

Consultancy:

I may be willing to consult on a variety of subjects. However, I am likely to be extremely selective on projects requiring substantial amounts of time as I have many projects of my own. However, if you are interesting in using any of the following services I am willing to talk:

Anagrams. Although there is not enormous demand for this expertise I can happily claim to be an (if not the) expert on the subject. I have published a book on the subject (Anagram Genius, Hodder and Stoughton), written and marketed over fifteen years what is considered to be by far the best anagram generating computer software and have given numerous interviews (radio and television). I have also been consulted widely on everything relating to anagrams and exchange email almost daily with random interested parties who approach me as a consequence of my online presence and knowledge in this area. My experience with anagrams has also given me a lot of insight into many issues involved in getting computers to process words and language.

Cryptic Crosswords. Having developed over the last eight years the only computer software which can analyse, explain and solve cryptic clues I have a completely unique perspective on this subject and have thought about aspects of cryptic clues which nobody has ever dealt with before. I also have a considerable amount of expertise on anything relating to solving, displaying or storing crosswords on computers or over the internet.

Software development. I have been avidly developing computer software for more than twenty years and have an extremely diverse range of software development skills.

I also have a very strong academic computer science background and am interested in projects that are technically difficult from an algorithmic point-of-view. I am especially strong on issues involving search, Artificial Intelligence or processing of words/language. The challenge of making computers do intelligent things is my main interest.

I have an extremely broad experience with developing under different platforms and with different languages. C++ is my language of choice for serious software development.

Getting computers to play intelligent games. I have developed chess-playing software and can still licence this code for the development of other computer chess programs. I also have a long-term interest and broad understanding of the issues involved in getting computers to play other intelligent games.

Software publicity. Anagram Genius has been featured on national television four times and has been written up in almost all the national press (in many cases more than once). Many international publications have also written about it including Time magazine which had an article in all its international editions on both me and the software. I have also done around fifty radio interviews promoting the software. Although I cannot promise to repeat this success my experience has given me a lot of experience in how to get software publicised especially within the UK. I also have a detailed contact list of journalists, radio producers and others.

Internet Consultancy. I have had an email address since 1982, been on the internet since it was invented and have a very broad knowledge of the network and many of the associated issues including business (I was using it for commerce long before the web was invented). I have been subscribed to many of the web marketing newsletters for many years and have many friends and other contacts actively involved in the management and development of internet businesses.

Electronic Commerce. My business is one of Worldpay's oldest customers and I implemented all the electronic payment systems personally.

Intellectual Property:

I developed and control (through my business) the following items of intellectual property which are possibly available for licensing or business deals in various contexts. Many of the technologies are showcased on the crosswordtools.com site. If you can make use of them in your business, please get in touch.

Main assets

Crossword Maestro is the only software that can solve cryptic crossword clues (it can also tackle non-cryptic and American-style clues). It also explains in plain English how the clue relates to the answer. This is an extremely sophisticated product and what it does was considered beyond what computers are capable of before it was written. The software is described in detail here and an online version is here. Recent work has resulted in the clue solving backend being now almost completely machine independent. Any platform that can handle ANSI SQL queries and compile C++ could host the technology.

The Anagram Genius website at www.anagramgenius.com is probably the most popular anagram-related website on the internet with several thousand visitors per day. The customer database includes details of more than one million users of the server, well over 200000 of which are members of the members' club. (Use of this information is governed by the site's Privacy Policy). I also own a number of generic domain names related to anagrams.

The Anagram Genius archive which is a database of more than twenty-five thousand of the best anagrams ever discovered most of which exist exclusively in this collection. I own the copyright to the collection of anagrams and the anagrams can be licensed for any purpose provided the discoverers are acknowledged when it is practical to do so. The archive can be viewed online.

The Anagram Genius software is the world's most sophisticated anagram-generating software. It is a huge C++ program developed over a period of fifteen years or more. Every line was written by myself. The compiled versions of the product are described here and samples of the output can be obtained for free on the Anagram Genius server. The server as it stands can be licensed for other sites. The backend powering the online versions is compiled for Linux. The anagram-generating backend is now completely machine-independent C and can be compiled for almost any platform.

Cyber Chess I also own the code to a chess program I wrote a number of years ago which became the definitive chess-playing software for the Acorn platform (advert). The software is written in ANSI C and is available for licensing for any platform except the Acorn Archimedes. The back-end has recently been ported for the PC and Linux and can be ported to any other platform with a C compiler.