Conspiracy Theories

 

I've been watching the emerging story about the super yacht "Bayesian" which sunk off the Sicilian coast over the weekend. I suppose my draw to this tragedy is sparked by the fact that one of the passengers was a chap called Mike Lynch who was a big name in UK IT circles and whom I met (briefly) once at a software conference in London, he seemed like a decent bloke. Lynch founded a company called Autonomy back in 1996 and built it up to be a multi-billion dollar enterprise eventually selling out to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for $11Bn. The sale was successful from a financial point of view for Lynch who is rumoured to have trousered over half a billion, but was a disaster for HP who later went on to sue Lynch and his management team for allegedly over inflating the value of the firm. After a 10 year legal battle, and after being deported to the USA, Lynch was acquitted of all charges this year.

Interestingly, the name of the 55m boat, which was registered to Lynch's wife Angela, refers to one of the main statistical techniques used by Autonomy in their early products. Named after Thomas Bayes, who first published a paper on probability theory in 1763, Bayesian statistics were developed further in the 18th and 19th centuries and now form the basis of a lot of the software products that aim to find patterns and classify the vast volumes of data in modern transactional and unstructured content (i.e. documents, video and audio) based systems. Many new AI tools like ChatGPT have Bayesian algorithms buried deep inside them, it's quite amazing how these seemingly brand new things have their roots tracing as far back in history as the 1700s!

So why did I title this post "Conspiracy Theories", well, in a slightly unbelievable turn of events Lynch's co-defendant in his trial this year, Stephen Chamberlain, was out running in Cambridgeshire on the same weekend as the Bayesian sank when he was struck by a car and died! No doubt these two events are not linked in any way but you can certainly see how conspiracy theories start!

Unfortunately I fear that the six people missing after the sinking of the Bayesian are probably drowned, although people have survived in air pockets in boats before it seems like this incident was particularly violent and sudden, I suspect the passengers, who were sleeping when the storm hit, had little time to react and I know that Lynch himself had some kind of lung condition, not ideal if you have to spend any time underwater! We will, no doubt, find out more as the situation unfolds but you can't help but feel sadness for all involved, it seems like a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.