You may have to forget everything you learnt from Sherlock Holmes, CSI, and Prime Suspects, as engineers at Columbia University have discovered, with the help of AI, that not every fingerprint is unique!
A team, lead by undergraduate senior Gabe Guo, challenged the presumption that fingerprints of different fingers of the same person are unique. At first no-one would publish the findings, but eventually the truth got out!
Creative Machines Lab’s Hod Lipson said: “Many people do not think AI cannot make new discoveries – that is just regurgitates knowledge. But this research shows how fairly simple AI, given a fairly plain dataset that the research community has had lying around for years, an provide real insight that has eluded experts for decades.”
He added, “We are about to experience an explosion of AI-led scientific discovery by non-experts, and the expert community, including academia, needs to get ready.”
