Michael Lynch, the cofounder and chief executive of Autonomy, built Britain's largest software company by solving a hard problem in computer science: how do you find something obscure within unstructured data--that is, within information not organized into fields that are recognized by databases (whether text, audio, or video), which constitutes most of what has ever been digitally recorded? Autonomy's technology (which is licensed by diverse organizations) supplements traditional search methods with pattern recognition techniques derived from Bayesian inference, an abstruse form of statistical analysis. He spoke with TR's editor in chief, Jason Pontin.

TR: Why do I care about unstructured information?