You can hardly read a magazine or newspaper or watch TV without running across the topic of Artificial Intelligence. AI is becoming more “humanized” every day. I read the other day that law enforcement organizations are looking more and more to AI to help solve crimes — kind of like an artificial Sherlock Holmes to help them out.
Sherlock Holmes was, of course a fictional detective created by the British author and physician Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle. He created the character in 1887 and Sherlock Holmes has had quite a following ever since. Even today he has his own official fan club, called the Baker Street Irregulars. In the 20th century so many readers were convinced that Holmes was a real person they sent mail to his address at 221B Baker Street in London. He even has his own page on Facebook.
Doyle claimed that he modeled his famous detective on Dr. Joseph Bell of the University of Edinburg. Doyle had been Bell’s assistant when he was a medical student at the university. Doyle, and everyone else, was awed by Bell’s ability to deduce all kinds of details regarding origins, life histories, and professions of his patients by his acute powers of observation. The doctor had what his students called “the look of eagles” — very little escaped him.Reportedly, he could tell a working man’s trade by the pattern of the calluses on his hands and what countries a sailor had visited by his tattoos.
In 1892, Doyle wrote an appreciative letter to Bell, saying, “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes.” When Bell was asked about the resemblance between him and Sherlock Holmes, he replied that “Dr. Conan Doyle has, by his imaginative genius, made a great deal out of very little, and his warm remembrance of one of his old teachers has colored the picture.”
Bell wrote an introduction to the 1892 edition of A Study in Scarlet, the story that launched Holme’s career as a sleuth — and, Doyle’s as a writer. By the mid-1890s, Doyle had largely abandoned medicine for the life of a full-time writer.
Dr. Joseph Bell was a fellow of the the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and the author of several textbooks and one of the founders of modern forensic pathology. The university honored his legacy by establishing the Joseph Bell Centre for Forensic statistics and Legal Reasoning in 2001.
One of the center’s first initiatives was to develop a software program that could aid investigations into suspicious deaths. Police detectives have praised the potential of the software. The software is called — appropriately — Sherlock Holmes.
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