Armchair detective Armchair detective An armchair detective is a fictional investigator who does not personally visit a crime scene or interview witnesses; instead, he or she either reads the story of the crime in a newspaper or has it recounted by another person. As the armchair detective never sees any of the investigation, the reader can attempt to solve the mystery on the same terms as the detective. The phrase possibly originates in a Sherlock Holmes story from 1893, "The Greek Interpreter", in which Holmes says of his brother Mycroft, "If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from
Alan Mycroft charitable organisation whose single-board computer is intended to stimulate the teaching of basic computer science in schools. Mycroft has four children. Alan Mycroft Alan Mycroft is a professor at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, where he is also director of studies for computer science. Mycroft read Mathematics at Cambridge then moved to Edinburgh where he completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree with a thesis on the Abstract interpretation and optimising transformations for applicative programs supervised by Rod Burstall and Robin Milner. Mycroft's research interests are in Programming Languages, Software Engineering and Algorithms.