AI fought the law, and won

An artificial intelligence lawyer, CaseCruncher Alpha, just beat 100 lawyers in a challenge. The robot and 100 of London's top lawyers were put up against each other and given "the basic facts of hundreds of PPI (payment protection insurance) mis-selling cases and asked to predict whether the Financial Ombudsman would allow a claim." In total, they submitted 775 predictions, and as it turns out, CaseCruncher had an accuracy rate of 86.6 percent, while the students only got 66.3 percent correct. But according to CaseCruncher, machines are only better at humans in predicting outcomes when the question is defined "precisely," meaning: we have a long way to go. CaseCruncher is the project of three Cambridge Law students: Jozef Maruscak, Rebecca Agliolo and Ludwig Bull.