Will a robot be the next InCo participant?

[cwent2]

DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ceramic_pizza]

This kinda stuff has been around for quite a while though. I guess the Bond robot is newer and better than the old autopens but I don't think it's going to really replace handwriting.

[Scrawler]

When we started the original research into mechanized handwriting in around 1980, the intent was part of a series of experiments to understand the movement of arm muscles for the purposes of designing power assisted prostheses. The hand was very difficult to model, with its four fingers and opposed thumb. My colleague at that time was Dr. J. Hamilton, a physicist and mathematician who came up with the idea of directing muscle movement with curve smoothing algorithms, of the type originally intended for drawing meteorological pressure maps. It was not a big problem to draw individual letters, but every letter in script joins to every other in a different way. It was Dr. Hamilton's idea to find points on the surface of every letter, assemble each word as a series of points, then use the curve smoothing routines to calculate a single curve that ran through all of the points. This was very successful and was easy to translate to a plotter, which is the method still used in the system we are talking about here. The "autopen" that ceramic_pizza mentions above is a much simpler technology, which copies direct input from a user, translates it to coordinates, then transmits them to a plotter like device. After we designed and built the original system we could simulate a person's writing well, but it was too even. Each word when repeated in the same context looked exactly the same, unlike human handwriting, which reflects muscular tremors that induces inaccuracy in the script. In around 1982 we added a function that introduced a percentage inaccuracy, which we could control as a parameter. At between 10-15% the results were indistinguishable from a human using a ball pen. At that time we had to use a "supercomputer", in this case a Cray to perform the calculations. There was no way a disabled person was going to be hooked up to such a machine to direct their prosthetic arm to do hand writing, but the important thing was that we had the algorithms ready and waiting for such time that computing power would catch up. It is now possible for an ordinary person to have that power and more in their pocket. I find it all rather odd that the derivation of that work we did is now not being used to help the limbless write, but for commercial toys. But we could not really predict the death handwriting, and we were so wrapped up in making something good for people that we completely failed to predict that if they had the power to make this happen, they also had the power to make it irrelevant.

[Scrawler]

This is an example written in Dr. Hamilton's writing style. It is an exact copy of a letter I mailed from Trinity, which I took to show the recipient to see if he would be mystified by the exactness of the copy. Look closely, the first thing you will see is that each letter is perfectly formed, without variation, and there are no capital letters. The gist of this letter was to poke fun at the doctor it was written to, whose notes were always printed and had frequent misspelling. He could not write in script. A part of the fun is in misspelling of "spel" and the postscript where I referenced the lack of upper case letters. This is what passed for amusement in our warped little minds back then. Somewhere hidden in my records I have other similar letters which do include capitals. I will dig some out, if I can ever sort through the mess of boxes of my old work.



Hanging on my office wall is a copy of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll also written by our robot hand. It is behind glass, so I will probably not be able to photograph it well to show it. We used to quote nonsense verse to each other as we worked, and a requirement to be on the team was the ability and willingness to learn and amuse the others with verse of some sort or other. For those of you who like paper, it was written on Conqueror Bond.