From "Law and Order" to "CSI," not to mention real life, investigators have used fingerprints as the gold standard for linking criminals to a crime. But if a perpetrator leaves prints from different fingers in two different crime scenes, these scenes are very difficult to link, and the trace can go cold.
I kinda assumed this was the case, and some higher ups likely know this too. I know in Ontario, when you get fingerprinted by the police, it’s not just your fingers, they’ll take your whole palm print. Billions of people in the world, very unlikely anyone is 100% unique.
That wasn’t really their finding though. They found that the AI could recognize when different fingerprints came from different fingers of the same person.