Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

Blog Notes Photos Links Archives About

Someone on quora asked:

Why don’t computer programs determine whether a potential criminal is guilty or not?

Seriously? Determination of guilt or innocence isn’t a purely computational matter. There are no algorithms that can compute guilt. Adding to the complication are varying intricacies of law in different jurisdictions. If humans don’t know how to get it right, then we can’t program computers to do so either.

Arguably, we could build programs that learn to make such judgments, but in order for such programs to work we would need more data to train them. A lot of data, given the impossibly large number of possible ways that a crime can be committed. Way, way more data than we have criminal cases worldwide. We are probably two or three generations away from such a thing being even conceivably possible.

Posted by under notes at #answers
Also on: quora / 0