Yesterday’s New York Times has a potentially significant article on advances in neural network pattern recognition software:

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

While the article largely focuses on the above areas, the technique, that involves recognition of underlying patterns, could have hug potential for moving forward our outcome research and triage functions, since it could be used to identify not only likely outcomes of court cases, but also the impact of different interventions upon those outcomes.

The interesting news in the article is that the technology is such that every advance in speed and power of the machines moves forward the quality of the outcomes.  It is not necessarily dependent upon new breakthroughs in the algorithms — although they will surely come and surely help.