Our fingerprints may NOT be unique, study finds - in breakthrough that could help solve thousands of cold cases

Thousands of cold cases could be solved thanks to an breakthrough in fingerprint analysis by artificial intelligence. A computer using artificial intelligence system has shattered the received wisdom of decades that each fingerprint from a person's finger is unique. So if a criminal left a thumbprint at one crime scene, and a print from his index finger at another, there would be no way to link the two. The breakthrough came about when a Columbia University student attempted to see if artificial intelligence could find links between apparently very different fingerprints from the same person. To test the idea, Gabe Guo, an engineering graduate with no background in forensics presented a computer with images of some 60,000 fingerprints in pairs.