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.
The article is about matching different fingerprints from different fingers of the same person (something we apparently thought wasn’t possible) rather than finding different people who share fingerprints. AI can do it with 77% accuracy which they say isn’t enough to convict someone by itself but could help with narrowing leads.