WHEN it comes to identifying fingerprints left at the scene of a crime, the FBI is a victim of its own success. Filing cabinets at its headquarters in Washington DC are bulging with more than 200 million fingerprint records on individual cards, 29 million of them from criminal suspects. But searching through them for a match can take so long that local police are often forced to release suspects without charging them long before the FBI comes up with a match.
What is more, the problem is getting worse. Up to 60 000 new fingerprint cards arrive at the FBI's headquarters each day.
The obvious solution is to computerise the records so that automated pattern-recognition software can search for matches. But this is not as easy as it might seem. Digitising each fingerprint takes up 600 kilobytes of computer memory, according to Christopher Brislawn of the Los Alamos National Laboratory ...
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