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12/04/2005: "The truth about fingerprints - at last!"
You know, it's never made sense to me, the fact that no two people in the world can have identical fingerprints. I mean, yes, the chances are microscopic, but it is just possible that Murphy's law makes two identical thumbs somewhere out t here. Just because the possibilities are astronomical for the combinations of loops, whorls and arches, it doesn't mean that they can't repeat, ever.
A quick analogy: If we write a computer program that spits out numbers between 1 and 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 - is it absolutely impossible that the number 8 comes up more than once?
Anyway, a lovely New Scientist article is suggesting that fingerprinting is not as exact a science as we all grew up to believe. And even though it doesn't cite the argument I used above, it still offers important insights into the process of fingerprint matching and what can go wrong.
Have a look at the article: www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725174.500.
Yvonne Eve Walus on Sunday, December 4th 2005 @ 10:23 AM GMT [link]