The base rate fallacy is the habit of judging the likelihood of something from a specific case while ignoring how common it is in general. The prosecutor's fallacy is its courtroom form: if a DNA match has a one-in-a-million chance of occurring at random, it is wrong to conclude that the defendant is almost certainly innocent or guilty without considering how many people could have left the sample. Consider a city of millions: a rare match can still point to many people, so the chance of a false match somewhere in the database can be large even when any single match is improbable. William C. Thompson and Edward Schumann introduced these terms in 1987 to describe such reasoning errors in law. Bayes' theorem shows how the prior probability of guilt should be combined with the evidence.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.