I sent robot forgeries to a handwriting expert

have you ever gotten one of these letters with a signature on the bottom so of course you hold it up to the light and you see the paper isn't indented then you pull out your Loop to see if this thing is printed but you can't tell so of course you break out the microscope and there it is toner who do they think they're gonna fool with this I've been thinking about this because I committed to sending out a ton of handwritten cards which turned out to be really hard one thing led to another and I ended up building a robot to write the cards for me but that also turned out to be really hard mostly because I'm not willing to just have a printout if I'm going to commit fraud we're doing it properly we're talking cards that are indistinguishable from Human writing written by a robot with a pen and a manufacturing cell to automate the entire process this entire project came down to one question how good are the forgeries I spent a lot of time seeing if my wife could pick out the forgeries but what I'm really excited about is I sent samples to a forensic handwriting expert I've only ever seen these guys in movies but they're real the one I sent it to you is to work for the Secret Service and I'm terrified to see what he's going to say because I think he's going to see right through me forging handwriting isn't a new idea for me back when I was a kid my mouth would get me into a lot of trouble and my dad would have me write lines one time my dad gave me a hundred lines and I had a horrible attitude and said I don't care so he said all right a thousand lines I was just like whatever I don't care he said okay ten thousand lines a long story short that's the first time I tried to automate handwriting I tried to carve the line I needed right into a potato and use that as a stamp but it did not work but I've been thinking this through and maybe the reason I failed is I just didn't have the correct technology yet yeah I'm not sure you would have fallen for that the thing I have in mind should be a lot better than a potato my plan is to have one robot that can move a pen anywhere you want to draw whatever you want for it to draw the right things we'll need a bunch of software to convert the text into handwriting this is going to be the hard part so I'm going to bring up the drawing robot so we can start testing out the software I was about to design and build a robot that does this but I took a look on the internet and it turns out you can buy a complete machine that does this for less than it would have cost me to get the parts so we're gonna do that yeah maybe anything in there you might have noticed that I haven't made anything in a little while and a big part of that is there's been tons of stuff happening in my life but equally important I actually haven't had a shop until now this is actually my sixth Workshop as an adult but I finally have a long-term lease and the only way I'm leaving here is if I go bankrupt and then most importantly of all there is tons of room for activities tools piles of junk all the important stuff I can't wait to pack this full of stuff that I should have thrown out 10 years ago so this should be the handwriting robot buying a robot is so much easier than building it I should do this more often I think that's it you just put some paper in here and a pen in here and it'll draw whatever you want this is so cool but way too precise we needed to write like a human the easiest way to generate handwriting is to find some font that's handwriting and send that to the robot it writes a little bit differently than a human yeah this definitely isn't going to people like anyone since I made these cards I'll always be able to tell which one was written by the robot even if it's good so what we're going to do is have my wife see if she can pick out the Imposter from a lineup of genuine handwriting this one is extremely obvious so it's really just a test to make sure my wife isn't effective how you feeling you feeling ready I'm ready feeling good hit me with it your engine started it's roaring does it run diesel or unleaded leaded well this one is obviously fake congratulations you did something really easy thanks why is it so obviously fake every letter looks the same every s is squished up on the bottom it's totally straight across it just looks like a font failure you better get back to work on that machine for the next attempt we're going to record my handwriting I'm going to write every letter a bunch of times and then write a program that takes these letters and types them out kind of like a font but it'll choose a different letter every time and Vary the spacing and straightness to make it look more natural [Music] okay not that bad let's see what my wife thinks they're all from Shane is that what you name the robot so you can feel good about yourself and sleep at night [Music] these are obviously real are you trying to write badly just to trick me no I think this is the fake one but why why [Music] some of it's weirdly far apart imp important and none of them are connected at all which happens a lot and this D on the postcard it's like postcard I mean I know how it was made the lighters are pasted together and to me that's how it looks the main issue seems to be lighter spacing and drawing them in a way that makes sense I'm going to sit down and write every combination of two letters this is going to give my program a concrete example of how any letter flows into any other letter so if I want to write a t after this a I can just look at my example and use that t and it should make sense if you're wondering if this is more work than just writing out the cards we don't talk about that around here I really like this technique but it does have a couple problems let's say I want to write the word cap I have a reference on how to draw CA and a t but I have two a's now so which one do I use I couldn't find a way to blend them together so I just flip a coin definitely not great but it's a little better what's the verdict all right is this the fake one I'm asking the questions here am I right yes wife you are correct we're gonna save some time here and just say that it looks fake for the exact same reasons as the last card you know this whole exercise reminds me of afraid to ask why I don't know have you ever heard that you can't get to the Moon by climbing successively taller trees no we need to stick the monkey in a rocket if we want to get to the moon if you get what I'm getting at am I the monkey no we obviously need a different software approach but I'm tired of software let's make the robot work we have the pen plotter that'll do all the handwriting for me but if I want to make a ton of cards I have to sit here and feed them in and out which is terrible instead what we're going to do is replace my arm with a robot arm which is happy to wait for the plotter it'll work 24 7 365 for zero dollars an hour and it'll like it you might recognize this arm from a previous project it's a tormach za6 it's a robot that can move and rotate in every direction which is perfect for what I needed to do what I want to be able to do is take a stack of cards and stick them in the machine and this robot will grab them one at a time put them into the plotter where it's going to be written and then take them and organize them someplace else for me to mail meanwhile I'm someplace else doing something important at the moment the robot has this little red nub which cannot pick up or move cards I do have this little sort of gripper hand thingy but imagine trying to get this gripper under one card without moving the whole stack and even if you do that good luck putting it down where you want it to go since the card is big and flat we can grab it with the power of suction but you can see that it takes a while to turn off which is annoying so I came up with this design which is kind of like an octopus tentacle it pulls air through these suction cups to firmly grasp it at least in theory let's see if it works [Applause] I'm using the same vacuum generator that I used on my puzzle robot to generate the suction these are really cool the main benefit is I can turn it on and off almost instantly very cool on the first try too that never happens it can pick up one card at a time and place it right where you want the next problem is that if the robot just sets the card in here there's nothing holding it in place and the pen is going to slide it all over the place I don't know if you can tell what it was trying to draw but not that for all the cards I've written so far I've held them down with little magnets there's no way that the robot is going to pick up and put down little magnets so I made this holy plate it attaches to a shop vac which should suck the card right down onto the table if for some reason you want to make this robot all the design files are available for free I made them in on shape and there's a link in the description where you can sign up and download them now the robot can stick the car down in here and slide all over but if we turn the vacuum on it's not going anywhere totally stuck but then when you turn the vacuum off it's free to leave it's no longer being detained the last challenge here is actually kind of subtle I've got a big stack of cards that gets shorter as the robot uses them and the robot would have to compensate for this by going further and further down we could put the cards on a motorized platform so they're always at the same height but that would definitely be over engineered so what I'm going to do is push the stack of cards against a fixed surface with a spring this will put the top card always at the same height but because the cards are flexible if they're only held back by their very edges we should be able to grab them in the middle and the card will bend and reliably let only one out let's see if it works this also works in Reverse to stack the cards when they're finished yes [Music] this is so cool and it was surprisingly easy to be at working at least the robot part there's just one more thing that it needs kind of amazing these big beady eyes make me feel kind of guilty you know having it work 24 hours a day for zero dollars an hour I still love you all of our software so far has told the computer explicitly how to generate each letter with complicated schemes to try to make it look natural but they don't what if instead we don't think about drawing individual letters imagine that I'm writing something and I stop here even though you don't know what I'm writing based on the shape of what has been written you know the next place the pen is most likely to go is somewhere around here we're going to make a program that does this look at the shape of what's been written and predict where the pen will go next and then if we pretend the pen actually went there we could feed this back into the program which will predict the next place the pen will go and on and on and on although the way I've described it can't work all these predictions are based on the shape of what's been written it has no idea what I'm trying to write the partially written word we started with could plausibly turn into a lot of different stuff so we're going to add a second predictor program this program will also look at the shape of what's been written except it's going to try to predict which letter it thinks we're currently writing and then the first program will see the this and only predict moves that would result in that letter now if we put it all together and start a new word the letter predictor thinks we're drawing a b and the pen predictor says that would start about here it'll continue like this until we get to the end of the B where the letter predictor will say we're at the edge of a b and an a the pen predictor might lift up the pen and move to start at the a or it could decide to connect them which is something you'll never get from pasting individual letters these predictors seem like magic and they kind of are but I'm going to do my best to explain them you can think of these predictors as an incredibly complex instrument with a ton of knobs when you ask it to predict the next thing to draw each of these knobs will tweak the prediction in some way our goal is to get them turned just right so they predict handwriting that looks real which is not what happens if these knobs are set randomly in that case you're going to get total garbage but if I have an actual example of what the handwriting should look like we can calculate exactly how garbage this result is call it garbage acity now if I turn one of these knobs just a little bit we can see how it changes the output and if it made our garbage oscity better or worse now we know which way to turn this knob to make things better so we can remember that and reset the knob and do this for every knob we have to do each knob separately because if you turn two knobs at the same time you don't know which knob did what after we do this for all the knobs we're going to take each knob and turn it just a little bit in the direction that will improve things if we run the predictor again it'll still look like garbage but slightly better garbage if we repeat this experiment with a ton of handwriting samples it'll get a little bit better with every example and will eventually Converge on a predictor with the knobs turned as good as we're going to get if everything worked right its predictions will be close to the examples but amazingly if we give it words that weren't in the examples it should be able to draw those two if you give the predictor enough knobs of the right types it will pick up on an enormous amount of detail of what's required to generate Handwriting Without You ever telling it what handwriting is you can basically say the computer learned to write which is why this is called machine learning although my description is very rough I glossed over the math and I simplified a lot of stuff I also did not come up with this technique everything I've said is based on the famous paper written by Alex Graves I've been struggling to even implement it at this point I've got some code but I need examples of handwriting to train it with I made this program which gives me lines to write it's like old times and it records All The Strokes for everything I write and after some good quality time we've got some data to train our predictor with now we run the training process which is very slow foreign the training is finally finished let's see what this thing can do [Music] [Applause] well that's a letdown so there was just a really dumb mistake hopefully it'll work this time but we have to train it again [Music] here we go again [Music] why oh duh not a great problem to iterate on all right if this thing had a body would attack it I just don't understand uh all right this one's looking good [Music] yes the main problem here is me I don't really know what I'm doing I did this project to try to get better at machine learning and to some degree I have but I'm in way over my head and I think it's time to do the pragmatic thing and see if we can find some code online that does what we want of course there's an open source repository that does exactly what I want except written 10 000 times better it even has a web demo you gotta be kidding me thank you [Music] it does look great I know in my brain that I'm just running someone else's code but man does it feel good to finally see some handwriting that isn't nonsense this is written by Sean Vasquez I'll link to it in the description and thank you Sean for saving me a ton of pain sometimes you just need a pro the path we took to making it work doesn't really matter as long as it works and it does I think [Music] no no no no no no no no it's a million times better than the other handwriting it's got that human touch I mean this looks really good wow there is no way my wife can tell if this is fake when you know that exactly one of the cards is a forgery we pretty much just choose the neatest card because that's kind of how computers tend to write so in this experiment between 0 and 4 the cards are forgeries it's up to you figure it out good luck we're all counting on you yeah I mean these all could be real handwriting I feel like but they all feel equally real or fake they all feel equally real or fake like if one is real they're all real if one is fake they're all fake I think they're all fake lucky guess I knew I I knew that she would know that I would do all them fakes and I thought I'd do all them real but then I thought maybe she'll know that I would think that I just want you to be impressed with your plumage with some of the guys code some other guy's plumage I don't know if I want to say that I think these look great I would be happy to have a machine pump out thousands of these [Music] I haven't actually explained what all these cards are for basically there's a bunch of people who help support these projects on patreon and I thought it would be cool to send out something as a way of saying thank you ideally something unique and part of a project and that's how I ended up making this entire thing so if you're a patron thank you and you should be getting a card soon the only thing left to do is to generate all of the postcards that the robot needs to write and it has a spreadsheet with everyone's information and it goes through that and combines the info with a template to get the personalized heartfelt message for every single person and when you do look at it this way it kind of loses some of its charm but I did have an idea that I think might salvage some of the charm let's see if I can find it if I put this little tiny hand on the robot I'm now technically correct when I say these are handwritten which is the best kind of correct all joking aside though I don't think it's okay to present robot written postcards as if they are written by me so I'm gonna have to make that clear but you know what I think a robot made postcard is cooler than a postcard written by some guy on the internet a couple of weeks ago I sent samples of robot handwriting to a forensic handwriting expert and the results are in I just got off the phone with Ron Morris he's the handwriting expert and what a fascinating guy he's done handwriting work with the DC police the Secret Service and the treasury Department he also wrote the book on it at least one of them we actually spent hours talking about it and I'm really tempted to make another video just going into the details of how this works but for this project right now there's really only one question that matters so how good is the handwriting if I didn't know any better it could be an actual writing by an individual not a machine wow that that is not what I was expecting you to say but as we talked about it more it became clear that there might be some ways you could tell that the cards were written by a robot the cards have distinctive characteristics that are shared across writing styles so if this was used in some kind of large-scale forgery ring you would probably be able to come up with some kind of profile that would allow you to determine if something was written by the robot I'm concerned believed if I had enough of this writing My overall takeaway from all this is that the cards are pretty good but not perfect hypothetically I would be afraid of committing a crime using this technology I think Ron would find a way to get me convicted oh yeah and one other thing Ron is retired so don't send him your handwriting samples you're just going to make a bunch of work for him and make him hate me please don't do that all right so clearly if we want to fold the pros we've got our work cut out for us but I think this is good enough for now and it's about time to hit that button and start the mass production process but before I do that I want to ask you for a favor I'm about to tell you about the video sponsor if you would just take a second to consider if it's something you might be interested in it really helps me out it's your support that makes these videos possible and I'm very grateful for it I basically have my dream job building stuff of dubious utility which is amazing so thank you and I also think you'll be interested in this video sponsor it's a legitimately useful tool that I use and it's called onshape onshape is a cad platform and CAD is what I use to design every part for everything I make before I make it it's also a little bit different than some of the cad tools you might have used before because it was built from the ground up to run in a web browser I didn't think that would work but it works and it allows us to do some really useful things you can have multiple people working on the same design at the same time kind of like Google Docs I used to work at a company called form Labs designing 3D printers and we would actually sit down in onshape with a group of Engineers and work on one shared design to figure out product architecture it really feels like the future this also completely eliminates file management everyone has access to all the designs with all their history on any device immediately I can be out in the shop with my phone and open up a design to check stuff this is also what enables me to share the designs of this project with you really easily and then one other really cool thing is they've opened up the programming language that onshape is written in so if you need to do something unusual you can build an entirely new feature in onshape to do that thing modeling dog bone pockets for CNC router joints has always been a pain for me and I made a feature to do that automatically and now it's not a pain it's great and although onshape is a serious tool it's designed for business use it's also free for hobby use so if you're a business and you want to try out a new CAD platform or you're a hobbyist and you want to try out a new 3D modeler check out on shape you can sign up for free all you have to do is go to onshape.pro stuff made here that's it thank you for taking the time to check out this video sponsor and thank you onshape for sponsoring this video I love working it's the best thanks again to everyone who supports these videos on patreon I still find it hard to believe that people like this stuff enough to do that I also hope this robot works because if it doesn't I'm in a lot of trouble [Music] thank you

Channel: Stuff Made Here

Views: 9,226,324

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Id: cQO2XTP7QDw

Length: 23min 38sec (1418 seconds)

Published: Sat May 27 2023