I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back of the room.
If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don't understand what they are doing.
I was making a lot of momentous personal decisions. I was still very very young: when the prize was awarded, I was 33; the work I had done when I was 21.