The notion of fingerprints being unique to each individual has proven to be incorrect.
New York: A system of artificial intelligence has debunked the idea that fingerprints are unique to each individual.
According to a long-held belief, if a criminal leaves fingerprints of the thumb and index finger on a crime scene, there cannot be any connection between the two.
Success in disproving this notion came when a student at Columbia University in America attempted to investigate whether artificial intelligence could reveal any correlation between the seemingly different patterns of fingerprints on the fingers of the same person.
To test this idea, an engineering graduate named Gib Goo presented a computer with patterns of 60,000 fingerprints paired in the form of joints.
In some cases, the patterns were of two different fingers of the same person, while in other instances, they belonged to different individuals.
Over time, the computer identified specific patterns that, although appearing to be different fingerprints, were from the same hand, marking a discovery never made before.
The research, published in the Journal of Science Advances, stated Gib Goo and his colleagues as saying, 'Our central finding is that there seems to be a similarity between the fingerprints of different fingers of the same person. These results hold true for all combinations of fingerprints, whether they come from different hands of the same person or not.'
The initial results of the study were initially rejected by a journal. The editor of the journal commented that it is well known that each fingerprint is unique, and therefore, it is not possible to find similarities between fingerprints, even if they come from the same person's hands."