How We Solved A 14 Year Old Mystery - Inside A Mind

last year i made a video asking the question is it possible to find a man using only a photograph of his face and just before 2020 ended you guys answered that question [Music] before we tell this story it's very clear that a lot of you who watch these videos love solving these mysteries yourself like a detective so i've reached out to the company known as hunterkiller to sponsor this video hunter killer is a subscription game that sends you a monthly box set to your address featuring realistic police reports maps letters and even send you to websites that help you uncover a fictional murder case since a lot of people are stuck at home right now this is the perfect game to help kill some time and play with your friends online or if you want you can solve the whole thing yourself the game is designed to play it however you want each case has six boxes which gets shipped one at a time over the course of six months but if you don't want to wait a month for the next package you can instantly ship the next one at any time i've had so much fun playing the latest story they've released known as curtain call which is about a new york theater discovering the dead body of actress viola vane who went missing 80 years ago if you go to hunterkiller.com insider mind you can get 20 percent off your first box by using the promo code insider mind again make sure you use code insider mind for twenty percent off [Music] i first heard about perplex city from the youtuber austin mcconnell within the video he describes an elaborate scavenger hunt that took place in the uk in april of 2005 a london-based game company by the name of mind candy began a long-term alternate reality game that mixed brain teasers and trading cards into a product unlike any other city but what stood out to me was obviously the reason he made this video to begin with a puzzle card that featured a photo of a man's face japanese text on the left translating to find me the only real information anyone gained since the beginning of the search his name is satoshi probably this was made along with 255 other puzzle cards for perplex city all that could be solved were solved between 2006 to 2010 all but one of course the find me card otherwise known as a billion to one the billion to one card is to me the greatest hide-and-seek game that everyone is quit playing so dear viewer i have a call to action for you see this guy find him thousands of people over the course of many years have tried believe me they've all given up but why call it quits before the mystery is solved it's a worldwide game of hide and seek we've been counting for over a decade ready or not satoshi here we come the video didn't yield too many results in the search for satoshi but it did bring a long-lost mystery back into the spotlight for a brief period of time along with planting the story into the back of the minds of newcomers who'd never heard of it before a year later in 2018 a podcast emerged from asha isbrucker titled the unfinished search for a man named satoshi so adrian started hiring this whole team of game designers i remember to sort of find interesting people we put an advert in the newspaper and it was just in code i mean the whole thing the whole adverb was just in code there was no you know there was no like call us at this number or email so somebody's all in code and everyone got really excited about it because they thought it was like uh an advert from mi5 or something and with these new probably slightly disappointed mi5 hopefuls they got to work on these 256 puzzle cards within the podcast they interviewed one of the creators for perplex city andrew han and discussed the puzzle card a billion to one so could you tell me the story behind that card well um so i didn't i didn't uh i didn't think i was the one who came up with this idea although i think i was around when when we talked about it and we thought uh what would it be like if we had if we just took a photo of someone and you had to go find him and you know that this guy was called satoshi and if you found him then i think you would solve it i can't remember what was meant to happen when you found him um but that's something probably but just before they got on to andrew there was a previous guest at the beginning of the podcast she was called laura e hall laura's had a lifelong interest in solving mysteries and puzzles that's what got her interested in find satoshi um and i just my whole life i have never been able to get enough of that sort of stuff she's been looking for satoshi for a long time now uh 2006 i want to say 10 years ago i honestly did think that it was going to be a lot faster i mean here we are 10 years later or however long yeah and it's not been solved um i was pretty confident at the time though that it was going to be possible because i you know of course i had all the time in the world as a student to like just sort of mess around with that stuff laura had put together her own website for the hunt back in 2006 find satoshi.com it featured all the information you could use to help find this man i would love for it to be done i mean there's there's a lot of factors that would make it actually in my mind possible right like if he lives in an english-speaking country then it would be possible for me personally to keep working on it and to find him yeah i i will not give up hope um i mean yeah just as you know as time has passed like i've gotten really busy and it's difficult to get re-engaged in it just because it takes so much time well this is just one of those things that needs closure you know yeah like it's gonna be closure and the longer you know the longer it goes on it's on what ten years now right yes like the longer it goes on the more satisfying that closure will be right yes it was pretty inspiring how dedicated laura had been to this search and it got me thinking would it actually be possible to reignite this story could we actually get people searching for a man that was not found for the past 14 years after a year of pushing the topic to the back of the queue i finally made a decision on how i wanted to approach it i reached out to laura herself to see if she'd be interested in covering the topic with me then i made the title and first few seconds of the video abundantly clear what i wanted to do i asked the audience can they find this man i'm laura e hall i was a big player of purplic city when it was running i was really into billion to one the card for finding somebody by only using their name and picture while interviewing laura one of the most fascinating things i learned during this interview that i didn't include in the original video was that laura was married to the guy who made the puzzle card and it's not part of the game the game doesn't exist anymore there's no way to verify it except that i actually ended up marrying somebody who used to work on that game and he does know the answer so i i can bear i can get it verified um i have explicitly said to never ever tell me and to be as vague as possible because you know i'll share oh somebody's emailed me and they said they used to work at this ice cream shop in la with this person that's a that's a real tip that i got um you know and so he never says anything like he won't say anything by my request until we actually know the real answer so after uploading the video to youtube it seemed to get the reaction i was hoping for several people felt up to the task in searching for this mysterious man several twitter accounts appeared a discord was made and even a subreddit for any clues that could lead to satoshi but as the months went on not much luck was coming to the surface the video was still gaining traction every so often new people would join the search before eventually moving on to other things then a couple of theories started to arise that maybe the individual wasn't even real to begin with and it was a computer-generated image that the company had lied about when claiming it could be solved they had made an unsolvable puzzle card before the riemann hypothesis so it was suggested they faked this card too except this time they just didn't tell you it couldn't be solved despite many pieces of evidence heavily pointing in the opposite direction theories like that were becoming more and more prominent that is until a specific reddit user decided to join the search yes my name is tom lucas sega i'm from hamburg germany most people in this story know me by my username tommy or yeah i don't know how to pronounce it because i never had to say it out loud until now and yeah i'm a student a design student currently looking into artificial intelligence and design so i think it was in the beginning of the corona pandemic that i stumbled upon your video and yes it was really interesting to me that there are still some unresolved mysteries and i i also like the idea of this whole perplexity um card game so you obviously discovered it at some point but then you obviously for quite a long period of time you didn't actually look into it yourself correct yeah um when was it where you decided to actually start investigating yourself yes so i was at my parents house for the for the holidays or for for christmas eve um the 24th of uh december is with what we are celebrating here in germany and um we talked about an interesting story my sister sent out a message in a bottle in maybe 20 years ago and on that day of her birthday which is the 21st of december she got a message back and so we were in this uh mystery thing things are happening and the the satoshi thing popped up in my head again and i told them about it and i'm always telling interesting funny crazy stories so i don't think they always pay 100 attention after speaking with his family about the mystery he searched it up to see if people were still looking for the man and that's when he discovered the subreddit after realizing the subreddit was still active he decided to look into it himself as i mentioned i'm doing a research project on design and ai and i'm looking into everything ai that is popping up at the moment and i've found a search engine so a facial search engine that came from poland i think and it was so powerful that people could upload faces and they would it would find every instance of this phase in a lot of images around the web and it was so powerful in the in the beginning that they disallowed or disabled the functionality to upload and picture so you could only take a picture from yourself and i thought maybe i can give it a try with a satoshi picture i would print it out and hold it inside the camera and trick the system but i didn't find this exact thing so the next best thing was pim eyes because i just googled facial recognition reverse engine reverse image search something like this and this was the first one and i thought i i just give it a try and um on pim eyes it's pretty easy you just upload a picture and it shows you uh results how uh where it finds pictures that are similar to the face so this is the the main difference it is not like google image search where you just put in the picture and it shows you where on the internet the same picture is found it really scans the face and extracts the facial features and searches for those on the on the internet so i i did a quick uh a test with my own face and it found a lot of pictures of stuff i did online where my face was so i thought okay it's it's working really similar to this polish version that i found earlier and yes so i took the picture of satoshi in this version you can just upload a picture so you don't have to trick the the machine you just upload the picture and i think there were the first three results were the exact same picture from around the web and the fourth picture was the other picture that then cracked the case according to google trends pemai started to gain popularity in 2020 and while it's still not as strong as the other software it still did exactly what he wanted so first up i thought it's not him so it's it's just a picture of of a man and there were also more results but the further you go down the more unprecised they get so i thought okay it's just just a picture um i'm gonna just zoom in and check out some things because in the video that you did laura said that there are some things that are not um changing in a face of a person um something that is very identifiable for people's photographs throughout their lifetimes is there the nose and the ears and so i looked closer and the ears and the nose were really similar so i i thought okay maybe i can post it into the the subreddit because i just wanted to start a conversation there and help them and so i uploaded it and in the first uh in the first version i am wasn't really sure myself so i just yeah uploaded it to discuss it with the the other people after posting it to the subreddit more and more pieces started to fit this unsolved puzzle i think in in the beginning the post didn't get many upvotes i think it got some downvotes as well because no one was believing that it could be him and then one of the first findings i got on the website was that one of the executives was called satoshi but as laura mentions in her video satoshi is a really common name and it could be anyone so we don't have the uh the connection between the picture and this name it was just there was a list of the executives and he was one of them then some people looked into the website i did also look in the into the website and found some more pictures golf alpha mike echo he uh find phone found a picture of um a guy with a starting bip from a marathon and we could find out which marathon that was and or a half marathon and we typed in or i typed in the starting number and got back the name in japanese and then i put it into google translate and it translated to satoshi and i think i i yeah really got goosebumps and sugars and everything because now we not only knew that he looked really similar but the same person is called satoshi and and so i i think this this was if it was wrong then it was the closest we could have gotten so um yeah i i thought i i'm on to something or we are onto something because the whole uh reddit was helping out as well and i posted it and um then a lot some other pictures came up because we then had the japanese version of the name and could search for the japanese version of the name and we found pictures there the resemblance was just it was 100 percent the same person and we only had to contact him now we know that we got him eventually he got into contact with laura about the possible lead she sent two emails to this satoshi one in english and another in japanese eventually they got a response confirming he was our satoshi after receiving the news laura posted to twitter with andrew hong congratulating her along with her husband jay giving us some behind the scenes exclusives on what they had originally planned for the billion to one card he even told us that there was supposed to be a secret passphrase satoshi would say to you had you found him in person it's incredible to think that all it took to solve this mystery was waiting for technology to catch up with what we were asking of it it really makes you think how many other mysteries out there will come to a conclusion in the next few years due to technology just finally becoming advanced enough to solve it while it's exciting at the thought it also leaves you with a feeling of unease it's very important the puzzles like these show us exactly what our systems are capable of i think we sometimes forget how fast technology really is evolving around us we are now in a world where we can find someone based on nothing but a photo of their face we can place it on someone else we can even recreate their voice it's only a matter of time before humans and artificial intelligence becomes interchangeable are you afraid you should be the voice you are hearing right now is created entirely from an ai and if you're not impressed by how well it captures my voice from only giving it 30 minutes worth of a recording keep in mind this is only technology that's available today imagine what we will have in only a year's time it's scary to think how fast we are advancing maybe this is a rabbit hole we shall explore in the near future take this as a victory for now but keep this story in mind when you're next posting a picture of yourself online take care everyone i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Inside A Mind

Views: 1,864,656

Keywords: How we solved a 14 year old mystery - inside a mind, How we solved a 14 year old mystery, inside a mind, perplex city, satoshi, find me card, a billion to one, unsolved mysteries, unsolved mystery, inside a mind perplex city, laura e hall, austin mcconnell, reddit, deepfake, artificial intelligence, pimeyes, descript, hunt a killer, can you find this man?, find me, riddles with answers, hide and seek

Id: we2ES4Q8NYg

Length: 20min 37sec (1237 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/th0may]

Thanks for posting the video and especially creating the sub. It was the main reason I tried to find him.

[u/Alarming_General]

we did it Satoshi has been found!

[u/TheGolfAlphaMikeEcho]

Hey das me

[u/bradleydoom66]

OMFG! What a testament to the power of the hivemind.

[u/sheldonthewise]

we did it