So basically, having multiple partial prints from different fingers can now be narrowed down to a smaller number of individuals than could be done by previous methods. Matching a know individual to a partial print still requires manual comparison for proof.

I'm not surprised that all my fingers have an underlying similarity at this level, they all derived from the same DNA at the same time.

Only very minor ones. The primary objective in forensic fingerprint anaysis is to identify a suspect person -- not to identify which finger they used in the crime. It looks like the uniqueness of fingerprints for forensics remains valid for the time being.

On the other hand, even at only 77% match, it's surely very helpful in knowing the probability that a mixed set of fingerprints come from a given number of individuals?

There have been verified false positives before already, this is just more confirmation. Half of forensics is lies anyways. Stuff like matching bullets to gun barrels, handwriting analysis, all BS.

"In order to understand that it was merely identifying the angles and starting points of the ridges, they had to study the AI system's decision process. Thus, the team concluded that the AI was using an unexpected forensic marker."

What is interesting to me is that the design of their pattern-matching system (not AI, but I get that real researchers sadly need to use this term to get any funding) allowed them to identify WHY the results being given were being given, which I believe is (by design or because of huge complexity) not possible in the more complex LLMs.

It IS very surprising to find that part of a single individuals' prints could be identical across fingers.... not sure exactly what the forensic utility is though, since normally you want to use fingerprints to distinguish between different *people* not different *fingers*. I suspect that rather like DNA, forensic comparison uses a simplified mathematical model of the fingerprint or DNA to be able to more easily compare them, and model matches might not necessarily be aligned with real-life matches. So in any case it's good that some "thought-to-be-correct-but-not-really-proven" assumptions such as unique fingerprints are being challenged.

"Many people think that AI cannot really make new discoveries – that it just regurgitates knowledge," said Lipson. "But this research is an example of how even a fairly simple AI, given a fairly plain dataset that the research community has had lying around for years, can provide insights that have eluded experts for decades."

AI can't make new discoveries. It just shows how poor these "experts" were if they couldn't see that.

These are the dangers of "science is settled" approach, many so called $cientists take.

It's a good example of the outsider asking 'did you try xxxx?' having not spent years trying to improve the 'it works this way' method.

"He didn't know he can't do that" sort of thing.

AI can certainly make you see something from a different perspective, but calling it "AI making new discovery" is a stretch. It's like saying microscope made new discoveries and not the person using it.

Experts brought into court to compare fingerprints only compare a small set of features. By simplifying the way prints are compared, finding a match is also greatly facilitated. People have been convicted on the basis of a small part of a fingerprint, when the expert stands before the jury and solemnly declares that this small trapezoid matches that one, demonstrating, in the expert's experience, that the committer of the crime and the possessor of the finger are one and the same person.

Given the Horizon debacle, I wonder how many innocents are doing time because of those so called experts.

I suspect that the Horizon debacle was not so much down to "experts", as to a corrupt and dysfunctional business/management culture in the Post Office.

DNA evidence is also quite bad these days, the samples are analysed by unaudited proprietary algorithms and programs, and there have been multiple cases of one program saying it is a match and another saying it is not a match.

The development of this sort of software should really be government funded and open source.

Does fingerprinting not (like, e.g., DNA analysis) produce a probability that the two sets of prints are from the same person? If not, surely it could - and should.

This is more how I understood fingerprint evidence to work: That it eliminates those who do not match, leaving those who do, which is normally just one person.

The original finger print argument was (as I recall) that if you took 100 prints, then took any 1 of those 100 and compared them to the rest, you didn't get a match with any of the others. In this regard, the fingerprints are sufficiently different that they can be considered 'unique'. However, if you took prints from someone today, and compared them to 100,000 prints taken 10 years ago, there's a higher probability you'll get a false positive rather than a true positive: That the new prints will match sufficiently to someone else's prints, but not to the older copy of their own. This was due to the prints migrating/changing over time.

Bottom line was: For the purpose of a limited group shortly after a crime was committed and evidence obtained, fingerprints were good enough to narrow down the list of suspects to one person. Beyond that, the trust in fingerprint matching depreciates towards zero.

The above has been from articles both for and against fingerprints as evidence, particularly where research has shown support for the claims both for and against the reliability of fingerprints.

Bringing 'AI' into the mix is the same as introducing any fast processing system: It does the work faster, and potentially can go into finer detail. It doesn't make the process 'new', however: It remains pattern recognition and probability/predictive modelling.

There are huge databases of fingerprints in existence, for example for visiters to the US and soon for British visitors to EU countries. Can you be sure that fingerprints will be used only to eliminate suspects* and not to find them? After the next major terrorist attack** all possible means will be used to identify suspects and the pressure to get convictions will mean that doubts could well be swept aside.

*from the enquiry.

** surely a when not an if.

How many false positives did it suggest?

Interesting article: https://thecrimereport.org/2021/12/06/is-a-single-fingerprint-enough-to-convict/

From the article: While fingerprint matching, for example, is now a common tool in law enforcement investigations, there is still a lack of sufficient empirical studies that conclusively establish the uniqueness of the fingerprints, according to a study published in South Africa’s Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal.

the angles and curvature at the center of the fingerprint could be the same across an individual

How large an area are we talking about, because I'm looking at my index fingers and they're completely different. One does the usual swirly thing. The other sort of swirls at the tip end but the other goes down in straight lines until it suddenly veers off to the side.

insights that have eluded experts for decades

Was it really eluding the experts, or were the experts simply peddling the "they're all unique" line? I think uniqueness depends upon the accuracy of your equipment and what you're checking...a bit like the uniqueness of DNA testing.

Not sure how this changes things apart from potentially increasing the probability of an id hit on an individual when there is more than one partial print available.

They have not said that prints are matched between individuals, but a sample size of 60,000 is tiny in this context, assuming standard practice of having five appendages and two hands that's only 6000 individuals ... Be interesting to see what happens if it is run against a big database to see if the pattern matching happens between more individuals. If it turns out that 1 in 10000 are matched, how does that impact security of conviction based on fingerprint evidence alone (if that's a thing)?