Fergie's Tech Blog

Software models death row outcomes

In a rather interesting, yet bizarre, article in USA Today this morning, Susan Llewelyn Leach (The Christian Science Monitor) writes that:

"Convicts on death row can wait for years while appeals are filed and protests lodged. Many never get beyond this limbo. Others are executed."

"What determines the final outcome? That is the question two professors, one a criminologist, the other a computer scientist, asked as they took 28 years of data on prisoners facing the death sentence and fed it into a software program."

"What the software — known as an artificial neural network — managed to do was to predict with more than 90% accuracy who would be executed."

posted by Fergie @ 4/27/2005 06:28:00 AM