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Precrime Computer (Minus Precogs) Predicts Robbery
Lt. James McLaughlin of the Yonkers, New York police department Technical Support unit used a computer to analyze patterns in robberies in southwest Yonkers. According to the computer's analysis, there would be a robbery between 8 p.m. and midnight on Wednesday on South Broadway.
"He predicted it and he was right," Police Commissioner Robert Taggart said.
Anthony Jimenez, 17, of Gastonia, N.C., and Richard Pino, 20, of 108 Highland Ave., Yonkers, were arrested and two guns confiscated after a 25 year old woman was robbed of her cell phone at 8:44 p.m. Wednesday at South Broadway and Ludlow Street, police said. They were charged with first-degree robbery and first-degree criminal use of a firearm, both felonies.
(Minority Report precrime unit computer room)
In his 1956 short story Minority Report, Philip K. Dick wrote about the Precrime system. It used computers and precognitive human beings to predict murders before they happened:
In the gloomy half-darkness the three idiots sat babbling. Every incoherent utterance, every random syllable, was analyzed, compared and reassembled in the form of visual symbols, transcribed on conventional punchcards, and ejected into various coded slots.
(Read more about the precrime analytical wing)
Read more at Computer helps predict time, place of Yonkers robbery.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 7/24/2005)
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