I'm going to talk about a technology that we're developing at Oxford now, that we think is going to change the way that computer games and Hollywood movies are being made. That technology is simulating humans. It's simulated humans with a simulated body and a simulated nervous system to control that body. Now, before I talk more about that technology, let's have a quick look at what human characters look like at the moment in computer games. This is a clip from a game called "Grand Theft Auto 3." We already saw that briefly yesterday. And what you can see is -- it is actually a very good game. It's one of the most successful games of all time. But what you'll see is that all the animations in this game are very repetitive. They pretty much look the same. I've made him run into a wall here, over and over again. And you can see he looks always the same. The reason for that is that these characters are actually not real characters. They are a graphical visualization of a character. To produce these animations, an animator at a studio has to anticipate what's going to happen in the actual game, and then has to animate that particular sequence. So, he or she sits down, animates it, and tries to anticipate what's going to happen, and then these particular animations are just played back at appropriate times in the computer game. Now, the result of that is that you can't have real interactivity. All you have is animations that are played back at more or less the appropriate times. It also means that games aren't really going to be as surprising as they could be, because you only get out of it, at least in terms of the character, what you actually put into it. There's no real emergence there. And thirdly, as I said, most of the animations are very repetitive because of that. Now, the only way to get around that is to actually simulate the human body and to simulate that bit of the nervous system of the brain that controls that body. And maybe, if I could have you for a quick demonstration to show what the difference is -- because, I mean, it's very, very trivial. If I push Chris a bit, like this, for example, he'll react to it. If I push him from a different angle, he'll react to it differently, and that's because he has a physical body, and because he has the motor skills to control that body. It's a very trivial thing. It's not something you get in computer games at the moment, at all. Thank you very much. Chris Anderson: That's it? Torsten Reil: That's it, yes. So, that's what we're trying to simulate -- not Chris specifically, I should say, but humans in general. Now, we started working on this a while ago at Oxford University, and we tried to start very simply. What we tried to do was teach a stick figure how to walk. That stick figure is physically stimulated. You can see it here on the screen. So, it's subject to gravity, has joints, etc. If you just run the simulation, it will just collapse, like this. The tricky bit is now to put an AI controller in it that actually makes it work. And for that, we use the neural network, which we based on that part of the nervous system that we have in our spine that controls walking in humans. It's called the central pattern generator. So, we simulated that as well, and then the really tricky bit is to teach that network how to walk. For that we used artificial evolution -- genetic algorithms. We heard about those already yesterday, and I suppose that most of you are familiar with that already. But, just briefly, the concept is that you create a large number of different individuals -- neural networks, in this case -- all of which are random at the beginning. You hook these up -- in this case, to the virtual muscles of that two-legged creature here -- and hope that it does something interesting. At the beginning, they're all going to be very boring. Most of them won't move at all, but some of them might make a tiny step. Those are then selected by the algorithm, reproduced with mutation and recombinations to introduce sex as well. And you repeat that process over and over again, until you have something that walks -- in this case, in a straight line, like this. So that was the idea behind this. When we started this, I set up the simulation one evening. It took about three to four hours to run the simulation. I got up the next morning, went to the computer and looked at the results, and was hoping for something that walked in a straight line, like I've just demonstrated, and this is what I got instead. (Laughter) So, it was back to the drawing board for us. We did get it to work eventually, after tweaking a bit here and there. And this is an example of a successful evolutionary run. So, what you'll see in a moment is a very simple biped that's learning how to walk using artificial evolution. At the beginning, it can't walk at all, but it will get better and better over time. So, this is the one that can't goldenmary@example.net. (Laughter) Now, after five generations of applying evolutionary process, the genetic algorithm is getting a tiny bit better. (Laughter) Generation 10 and it'll take a few steps more -- still not quite there. But now, after generation 20, it actually walks in a straight line without falling over. That was the real breakthrough for us. It was, academically, quite a challenging project, and once we had reached that stage, we were quite confident that we could try and do other things as well with this approach -- actually simulating the body and simulating that part of the nervous system that controls it. Now, at this stage, it also became clear that this could be very exciting for things like computer games or online worlds. What you see here is the character standing there, and there's an obstacle that we put in its way. And what you see is, it's going to fall over the obstacle. Now, the interesting bit is, if I move the obstacle a tiny bit to the right, which is what I'm doing now, here, it will fall over it in a completely different way. And again, if you move the obstacle a tiny bit, it'll again fall differently. (Laughter) Now, what you see, by the way, at the top there, are some of the neural activations being fed into the virtual muscles. Okay. That's the video. Thanks. Now, this might look kind of trivial, but it's actually very important because this is not something you get at the moment in any interactive or any virtual worlds. Now, at this stage, we decided to start a company and move this further, because obviously this was just a very simple, blocky biped. What we really wanted was a full human body. So we started the company. We hired a team of physicists, software engineers and biologists to work on this, and the first thing we had to work on was to create the human body, basically. It's got to be relatively fast, so you can run it on a normal machine, but it's got to be accurate enough, so it looks good enough, basically. So we put quite a bit of biomechanical knowledge into this thing, and tried to make it as realistic as possible. What you see here on the screen right now is a very simple visualization of that body. I should add that it's very simple to add things like hair, clothes, etc., but what we've done here is use a very simple visualization, so you can concentrate on the movement. Now, what I'm going to do right now, in a moment, is just push this character a tiny bit and we'll see what happens. Nothing really interesting, basically. It falls over, but it falls over like a rag doll, basically. The reason for that is that there's no intelligence in it. It becomes interesting when you put artificial intelligence into it. So, this character now has motor skills in the upper body -- nothing in the legs yet, in this particular one. But what it will do -- I'm going to push it again. It will realize autonomously that it's being pushed. It's going to stick out its hands. It's going to turn around into the fall, and try and catch the fall. So that's what you see here. Now, it gets really interesting if you then add the AI for the lower part of the body as well. So here, we've got the same character. I'm going to push it a bit harder now, harder than I just pushed Chris. But what you'll see is -- it's going to receive a push now from the left. What you see is it takes steps backwards, it tries to counter-balance, it tries to look at the place where it thinks it's going to land. I'll show you this again. And then, finally hits the floor. Now, this becomes really exciting when you push that character in different directions, again, just as I've done. That's something that you cannot do right now. At the moment, you only have empty computer graphics in games. What this is now is a real simulation. That's what I want to show you now. So, here's the same character with the same behavior I've just shown you, but now I'm just going to push it from different directions. First, starting with a push from the right. This is all slow motion, by the way, so we can see what's going on. Now, the angle will have changed a tiny bit, so you can see that the reaction is different. Again, a push, now this time from the front. And you see it falls differently. And now from the left -- and it falls differently. That was really exciting for us to see that. That was the first time we've seen that. This is the first time the public sees this as well, because we have been in stealth mode. I haven't shown this to anybody yet. Now, just a fun thing: what happens if you put that character -- this is now a wooden version of it, but it's got the same AI in it -- but if you put that character on a slippery surface, like ice. We just did that for a laugh, just to see what happens. (Laughter) And this is what happens. (Laughter) (Applause) It's nothing we had to do about this. We just took this character that I just talked about, put it on a slippery surface, and this is what you get out of it. And that's a really fascinating thing about this approach. Now, when we went to film studios and games developers and showed them that technology, we got a very good response. And what they said was, the first thing they need immediately is virtual stuntmen. Because stunts are obviously very dangerous, they're very expensive, and there are a lot of stunt scenes that you cannot do, obviously, because you can't really allow the stuntman to be seriously hurt. So, they wanted to have a digital version of a stuntman and that's what we've been working on for the past few months. And that's our first product that we're going to release in a couple of weeks. So, here are just a few very simple scenes of the guy just being kicked. That's what people want. That's what we're giving them. (Laughter) You can see, it's always reacting. This is not a dead body. This is a body who basically, in this particular case, feels the force and tries to protect its head. Only, I think it's quite a big blow again. You feel kind of sorry for that thing, and we've seen it so many times now that we don't really care any more. (Laughter) There are much worse videos than this, by the way, which I have taken out, but ... Now, here's another one. What people wanted as a behavior was to have an explosion, a strong force applied to the character, and have the character react to it in midair. So that you don't have a character that looks limp, but actually a character that you can use in an action film straight away, that looks kind of alive in midair as well. So this character is going to be hit by a force, it's going to realize it's in the air, and it's going to try and, well, stick out its arm in the direction where it's landing. That's one angle; here's another angle. We now think that the realism we're achieving with this is good enough to be used in films. And let's just have a look at a slightly different visualization. This is something I just got last night from an animation studio in London, who are using our software and experimenting with it right now. So this is exactly the same behavior that you saw, but in a slightly better rendered version. So if you look at the character carefully, you see there are lots of body movements going on, none of which you have to animate like in the old days. Animators had to actually animate them. This is all happening automatically in the simulation. This is a slightly different angle, and again a slow motion version of this. This is incredibly quick. This is happening in real time. You can run this simulation in real time, in front of your eyes, change it, if you want to, and you get the animation straight out of it. At the moment, doing something like this by hand would take you probably a couple of days. This is another behavior they requested. I'm not quite sure why, but we've done it anyway. It's a very simple behavior that shows you the power of this approach. In this case, the character's hands are fixed to a particular point in space, and all we've told the character to do is to struggle. And it looks organic. It looks realistic. You feel kind of sorry for the guy. It's even worse -- and that is another video I just got last night -- if you render that a bit more realistically. Now, I'm showing this to you just to show you how organic it actually can feel, how realistic it can look. And this is all a physical simulation of the body, using AI to drive virtual muscles in that body. Now, one thing which we did for a laugh was to create a slightly more complex stunt scene, and one of the most famous stunts is the one where James Bond jumps off a dam in Switzerland and then is caught by a bungee. Got a very short clip here. Yes, you can just about see it here. In this case, they were using a real stunt man. It was a very dangerous stunt. It was just voted, I think in the Sunday Times, as one of the most impressive stunts. Now, we've just tried and -- looked at our character and asked ourselves, "Can we do that ourselves as well?" Can we use the physical simulation of the character, use artificial intelligence, put that artificial intelligence into the character, drive virtual muscles, simulate the way he jumps off the dam, and then skydive afterwards, and have him caught by a bungee afterwards? We did that. It took about altogether just two hours, pretty much, to create the simulation. And that's what it looks like, here. Now, this could do with a bit more work. It's still very early stages, and we pretty much just did this for a laugh, just to see what we'd get out of it. But what we found over the past few months is that this approach -- that we're pretty much standard upon -- is incredibly powerful. We are ourselves surprised what you actually get out of the simulations. There's very often very surprising behavior that you didn't predict before. There's so many things we can do with this right now. The first thing, as I said, is going to be virtual stuntmen. Several studios are using this software now to produce virtual stuntmen, and they're going to hit the screen quite soon, actually, for some major productions. The second thing is video games. With this technology, video games will look different and they will feel very different. For the first time, you'll have actors that really feel very interactive, that have real bodies that really react. I think that's going to be incredibly exciting. Probably starting with sports games, which are going to become much more interactive. But I particularly am really excited about using this technology in online worlds, like there, for example, that Tom Melcher has shown us. The degree of interactivity you're going to get is totally different, I think, from what you're getting right now. A third thing we are looking at and very interested in is simulation. We've been approached by several simulation companies, but one project we're particularly excited about, which we're starting next month, is to use our technology -- and in particular, the walking technology -- to help aid surgeons who work on children with cerebral palsy, to predict the outcome of operations on these children. As you probably know, it's very difficult to predict what the outcome of an operation is if you try and correct the gait. The classic quote is, I think, it's unpredictable at best, is what people think right now, is the outcome. Now, what we want to do with our software is allow our surgeons to have a tool. We're going to simulate the gait of a particular child and the surgeon can then work on that simulation and try out different ways to improve that gait, before he actually commits to an actual surgery. That's one project we're particularly excited about, and that's going to start next month. Just finally, this is only just the beginning. We can only do several behaviors right now. The AI isn't good enough to simulate a full human body. The body yes, but not all the motor skills that we have. And, I think, we're only there if we can have something like ballet dancing. Right now, we don't have that but I'm very sure that we will be able to do that at some stage. We do have one unintentional dancer actually, the last thing I'm going to show you. This was an AI contour that was produced and evolved -- half-evolved, I should say -- to produce balance, basically. So, you kick the guy and the guy's supposed to counter-balance. That's what we thought was going to come out of this. But this is what emerged out of it, in the end. (Music) Bizarrely, this thing doesn't have a head. I'm not quite sure why. So, this was not something we actually put in there. He just started to create that dance himself. He's actually a better dancer than I am, I have to say. And what you see after a while -- I think he even goes into a climax right at the end. And I think -- there you go. (Laughter) So, that all happened automatically. We didn't put that in there. That's just the simulation creating this itself, basically. So it's just -- (Applause) Thanks. Not quite John Travolta yet, but we're working on that as well, so thanks very much for your time. Thanks. (Applause) CA: Incredible. That was really incredible. TR: Thanks. What if you could only see one color? Imagine, for instance, that you could only see things that were red and that everything else was completely invisible to you. As it turns out, that's how you live your life all the time because your eyes can only see a minuscule part of the full spectrum of light. Different kinds of light are all around you everyday but are invisible to the human eye, from the radio waves that carry your favorite songs, to the x-rays doctors use to see inside of you, to the microwaves that heat up your food. In order to understand how these can all be light, we'll need to know a thing or two about what light is. Light is electromagnetic radiation that acts like both a wave and a particle. Light waves are kind of like waves on the ocean. There are big waves and small waves, waves that crash on the shore one right after the other, and waves that only roll in every so often. The size of a wave is called its wavelength, and how often it comes by is called its frequency. Imagine being a boat in that ocean, bobbing up and down as the waves go by. If the waves that day have long wavelengths, they'll make you bob only so often, or at a low frequency. If the waves, instead, have short wavelengths, they'll be close together, and you'll bob up and down much more often, at a high frequency. Different kinds of light are all waves, they just have different wavelengths and frequencies. If you know the wavelength or frequency of a wave of light, you can also figure out its energy. Long wavelengths have low energies, while short wavelengths have high energies. It's easy to remember if you think about being in that boat. If you were out sailing on a day with short, choppy waves, you'd probably be pretty high energy yourself, running around to keep things from falling over. But on a long wavelength sea, you'd be rolling along, relaxed, low energy. The energy of light tells us how it will interact with matter, for example, the cells of our eyes. When we see, it's because the energy of light stimulates a receptor in our eye called the retina. Our retina are only sensitive to light with a very small range in energy, and so we call that range of light visible light. Inside our retina are special receptors called rods and cones. The rods measure brightness, so we know how much light there is. The cones are in charge of what color of light we see because different cones are sensitive to different energies of light. Some cones are more excited by light that is long wavelength and low energy, and other cones are more excited by short wavelength, high-energy light. When light hits our eye, the relative amount of energy each cone measures signals our brain to perceive colors. The rainbow we perceive is actually visible light in order of its energy. At one side of the rainbow is low-energy light we see as red, and at the other side is high-energy light we see as blue. If light shines on us that has an energy our retina can't measure, we won't be able to see it. Light that is too short wavelength or high energy gets absorbed by the eye's surface before it can even get to the retina, and light that is too long wavelength doesn't have enough energy to stimulate our goldenmary@example.net. The only thing that makes one kind of light different from another is its wavelength. Radio waves have long wavelengths, while x-rays have short wavelengths. And visible light, the kind you can actually see, is somewhere in between. Even though our eyes can't detect light outside of the visible range, we can build special detectors that are stimulated by these other wavelengths of light, kind of like digital eyes. With these devices, we can measure the light that is there, even though we can't see it ourselves. So, take a step back and think about all of this for a moment. Even though they seem different, the warmth you feel from a crackling fire is the same as the sun shining on you on a beautiful day, the same as ultraviolet light you put on sunscreen to protect yourself from, the same thing as your TV, your radio, and your microwave. Now, those examples are all things here on Earth, things you experience in your everyday life, but here's something even more amazing. Our universe gives off the full spectrum of light, too. When you think of the night sky, you probably think of being able to see the stars shining with your own eyes, but that's just visible light, which you now know is only a tiny part of the full spectrum. If we had to draw the universe and could only use visible light, it would be like having only one crayon -- pretty sad. To see the universe in its full spectrum, we need to have the right eyes, and that means using special telescopes that can help us see beyond visible light. You've probably heard of the Hubble Space Telescope and seen its beautiful pictures taken in visible and ultraviolet light. But you might not know that there are 20 space telescopes in orbit, missions that can each see part of the full spectrum of light. With telescopes acting as our virtual eyes, both in space and here on Earth, we can see some amazing things. And the coolest thing of all, no matter the wavelength or energy, the light that we see out in the distant universe is the same thing as the light that we can experience and study here on Earth. So, since we know the physics of how x-ray, ultraviolet light, or microwaves work here, we can study the light of a distant star or galaxy and know what kinds of things are happening there too. So, as you go about your daily life, think beyond what your eyes can and can't see. Knowing just a little bit about the natural world can help you perceive the full spectrum around you all the time. If you want a glimpse of Marie Curie's manuscripts, you'll have to sign a waiver and put on protective gear to shield yourself from radiation contamination. Madame Curie's remains, too, were interred in a lead-lined coffin, keeping the radiation that was the heart of her research, and likely the cause of her death, well contained. Growing up in Warsaw in Russian-occupied Poland, the young Marie, originally named Maria Sklodowska, was a brilliant student, but she faced some challenging barriers. As a woman, she was barred from pursuing higher education, so in an act of defiance, Marie enrolled in the Floating University, a secret institution that provided clandestine education to Polish youth. By saving money and working as a governess and tutor, she eventually was able to move to Paris to study at the reputed Sorbonne. There, Marie earned both a physics and mathematics degree surviving largely on bread and tea, and sometimes fainting from near starvation. In Paris, Marie met the physicist Pierre Curie, who shared his lab and his heart with her. But she longed to be back in Poland. Upon her return to Warsaw, though, she found that securing an academic position as a woman remained a challenge. All was not lost. Back in Paris, the lovelorn Pierre was waiting, and the pair quickly married and became a formidable scientific team. Another physicist's work sparked Marie Curie's interest. In 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium spontaneously emitted a mysterious X-ray-like radiation that could interact with photographic film. Curie soon found that the element thorium emitted similar radiation. Most importantly, the strength of the radiation depended solely on the element's quantity, and was not affected by physical or chemical changes. This led her to conclude that radiation was coming from something fundamental within the atoms of each element. The idea was radical and helped to disprove the long-standing model of atoms as indivisible objects. Next, by focusing on a super radioactive ore called pitchblende, the Curies realized that uranium alone couldn't be creating all the radiation. So, were there other radioactive elements that might be responsible? In 1898, they reported two new elements, polonium, named for Marie's native Poland, and radium, the Latin word for ray. They also coined the term radioactivity along the way. By 1902, the Curies had extracted a tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride salt from several tons of pitchblende, an incredible feat at the time. Later that year, Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel were nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics, but Marie was overlooked. Pierre took a stand in support of his wife's well-earned recognition. And so both of the Curies and Becquerel shared the 1903 Nobel Prize, making Marie Curie the first female Nobel Laureate. Well funded and well respected, the Curies were on a roll. But tragedy struck in 1906 when Pierre was crushed by a horse-drawn cart as he crossed a busy intersection. Marie, devastated, immersed herself in her research and took over Pierre's teaching position at the Sorbonne, becoming the school's first female professor. Her solo work was fruitful. In 1911, she won yet another Nobel, this time in chemistry for her earlier discovery of radium and polonium, and her extraction and analysis of pure radium and its compounds. This made her the first, and to this date, only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. Professor Curie put her discoveries to work, changing the landscape of medical research and treatments. She opened mobile radiology units during World War I, and investigated radiation's effects on tumors. However, these benefits to humanity may have come at a high personal cost. Curie died in 1934 of a bone marrow disease, which many today think was caused by her radiation exposure. Marie Curie's revolutionary research laid the groundwork for our understanding of physics and chemistry, blazing trails in oncology, technology, medicine, and nuclear physics, to name a few. For good or ill, her discoveries in radiation launched a new era, unearthing some of science's greatest secrets. In the summer of 1895, crowds flooded the Coney Island boardwalk to see the latest marvel of roller coaster technology: the Flip Flap Railway. This was America’s first-ever looping coaster – but its thrilling flip came at a price. The ride caused numerous cases of severe whiplash, neck injury and even ejections, all due to its signature loop. Today, coasters can pull off far more exciting tricks, without resorting to the “thrill” of a hospital visit. But what exactly are roller coasters doing to your body, and how have they managed to get scarier and safer at the same time? At the center of every roller coaster design is gravity. Unlike cars or transit trains, most coasters are propelled around their tracks almost entirely by gravitational energy. After the coaster crests the initial lift hill, it begins an expertly engineered cycle – building potential energy on ascents and expending kinetic energy on descents. This rhythm repeats throughout the ride, acting out the coaster engineer’s choreographed dance of gravitational energy. But there’s a key variable in this cycle that wasn’t always so carefully considered: you. In the days of the Flip-Flap, ride designers were most concerned with coasters getting stuck somewhere along the track. This led early builders to overcompensate, hurling trains down hills and pulling on the brakes when they reached the station. But as gravity affects the cars, it also affects the passengers. And under the intense conditions of a coaster, gravity’s effects are multiplied. There’s a common unit used by jet pilots, astronauts, and coaster designers called “g force”. One G force is the familiar tug of gravity you feel when standing on Earth – this is the force of Earth’s gravitational pull on our bodies. But as riders accelerate and decelerate, they experience more or less gravitational force. Modern ride designers know that the body can handle up to roughly 5 Gs, but the Flip-Flap and its contemporaries routinely reached up to 12 Gs. At those levels of gravitational pressure, blood is sent flying from your brain to your feet, leading to light-headedness or blackouts as the brain struggles to stay conscious. And oxygen deprivation in the retinal cells impairs their ability to process light, causing greyed out vision or temporary blindness. If the riders are upside down, blood can flood the skull, causing a bout of crimson vision called a “redout”. Conversely, negative G’s create weightlessness. Within the body, short-term weightlessness is mostly harmless. It can contribute to a rider’s motion sickness by suspending the fluid in their inner ears which coordinates balance. But the bigger potential danger – and thrill – comes from what ride designers call airtime. This is when riders typically experience seat separation, and, without the proper precautions, ejection. The numerous belts and harnesses of modern coasters have largely solved this issue, but the passenger’s ever-changing position can make it difficult to determine what needs to be strapped down. Fortunately, modern ride designers are well aware of what your body, and the coaster, can handle. Coaster engineers play these competing forces against each other, to relieve periods of intense pressure with periods of no goldenmary@example.net. And since a quick transition from positive to negative G-force can result in whiplash, headaches, and back and neck pain, they avoid the extreme changes in speed and direction so common in thrill rides of old. Modern rides are also much sturdier, closely considering the amount of gravity they need to withstand. At 5 G’s, your body feels 5 times heavier; so if you weigh 100lbs, you’d exert the weight of 500 lbs on the coaster. Engineers have to account for the multiplied weight of every passenger when designing a coaster’s supports. Still, these rides aren’t for everyone. The floods of adrenaline, light-headedness, and motion sickness aren’t going anywhere soon. But today’s redundant restraints, 3D modeling and simulation software have made roller coasters safer and more thrilling than ever. Our precise knowledge about the limits of the human body have helped us build coasters that are faster, taller, and loopier – and all without going off the rails. In the summer of 2016, I did the sensible thing: I quit my cushy job at a hedge fund to write a play about my family's murder. (Sighs) I told my friends and family that this was about art, but in truth, I was on a spiritual vision quest. I was seeking closure to a relationship with someone that I barely knew - the kid who killed my mother and brother. He was my friend's younger brother, a kid from our neighborhood. He came over a handful of times to raid our family's snack cabinet. My mom actually used to wave to him from the van and say, "He's going through a hard time, I just want to make sure he knows that I see him." He broke into our house a couple of days before Christmas, looking for some stuff to sell for cash. When he came across my brother Jim asleep on the couch, he panicked, shot him and fled the scene. Then he realized he forgot his coat. By the time he came back, my mom had found Jim. Because he knew that she recognized him, and, to quote him, "Because she wouldn't stop screaming," he shot and killed her too. He is currently serving back-to-back life sentences in a prison in Southwestern Virginia. (Sighs) Over the course of the next seven years, I somehow managed not to hate him, but my grief and trauma did something a little bit weirder. He became a non-person to me. He wasn't a person, he was the face of all evil. He was the twister that came through and ripped up our house and threw it in some hellish version of Oz, but not a 17-year-old boy - or, I realized now, a 24-year-old man. A man who came of age in a cell, if he came of goldenmary@example.net. And as I set down to write the villain of my play and my life, I realized I had a name, some fractured childhood memories, a brief court document and nothing else to go on. So I went to the source of all answers, Google. I googled his prisoner ID number. That's when the internet sucker punched me in the face. Two thirds of prisoners in his penitentiary spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in eight-by-ten cells with slats for light. Conditions are so bad that in 2012 the entire prison went on a hunger strike. As I scrolled through case after case of human rights violations at this prison, suddenly, he became a person to me again. I remember the first time I saw mom and Jim's bodies in the funeral home, how my recoiled when I felt the small, destructive supernova that the bullet made in the back of Jim's skull. My mom's face just collapsed in on itself. Not her, just flesh and bones in that black dress we bought at Kohl's the week before. Those were my most painful memories. But when I pictured him - beaten, starving, crying out in a dark cell - yeah, that was somehow just as painful. And I realized it was because we were still connected. That steel tether of trauma that he hooked into my side when he killed them was still there, and I had been lurching against its pull and dragging him through the mud for the past seven years, whether I knew it or not. And it was with a little horror that I realized that he may have killed them, but I chose to keep us connected. So after wading through all the options - I mean, literally every option at my disposal - I realized the only way to get rid of this dude was to forgive him. That was a real bummer of a conclusion to come to. (Laughter) Because the truth was I thought that I already had forgiven him. I told my friends I forgave him; I told my family I forgave him; I even said "I forgive you" in the national news. So if saying you forgive someone is not the same thing as doing it, why was this guy still hooked into my side, dragging me around, making me do dumb things like quit my job to write a play? Turns out there is no fake it 'till you make it in forgiveness even though that's exactly what society expects us to do. So how do you forgive effectively, once and for all? That question started another Google rabbit hole, and then the theological rabbit hole, and then the Psychiatric-Journal and medical-journal rabbit hole until finally, my poor husband came home to a frantic wife, feral, just pacing the apartment, spewing statistics about forgiveness, like, "Did you know that there are 62 passages in the Bible with the word forgive and 27 with the word forgiveness? Not a single one tells you how to do it!" (Laughter) They just say how great it is! It's like the Nike of spiritual gifts: "Just do it!" (Laughter) And then there's this doctor Wayne guy over here, who says, "To forgive, we just got to let go and be like water." What does that mean? My husband approached me very cautiously. "Sweetie, what you doing?" (Laughter) "Trying to forgive the kid who killed my family, but nobody will tell me how." Oh, there are endless five-star historical Yelp reviews for forgiveness. The sales pitch is fantastic, but literally, What do I do? I think I was asking the wrong question, starting with how, when really what I needed to know was why. Why forgive? Why do it? That's when I discovered that most of us are forgiving for the wrong reasons. Some victims, like me, try to forgive right away because it's the right thing to do. But if we're honest with ourselves, there's only three reasons a victim forgives automatically. One: you think that forgiving quickly will make you a good person. That's an easy mistake to make, right? If forgiveness is good, a good person should forgive right away. But in all my research, I actually didn't find a timeline for forgiveness. Everybody was just really desperately urging us to get around to it because they knew we didn't want to. Even Jesus, when he talks about turning the other cheek, isn't talking about forgiveness. He's talking about non-violence. There has to be a middle ground between letting someone of the hook right away and going full an eye for an eye on them. Two: victims feel a lot of pressure to forgive from everyone else. It can come from your friends, from your family, from the media, from mixed up religious messaging. But the truth is, everyone wants you to forgive quickly so they can feel more comfortable, and they can move on. That's a crappy reason to do anything. Three: you think that forgiveness is a shortcut to healing. You think if you skip to the end of the story, you can bypass all the angry, vulnerable, messy healing crap. Spoiler alert: that one will come back to bite you in the butt. For me, it was all three reasons. I want to be a good person, I love pleasing other people, and I hate the vulnerable, angry, messy, healing crap. But it turns out that forgiveness is such a potent force that none of those reasons were strong enough to make it stick. Just like love. If your motivation is selfish, even a good selfish thing like healing, it will collapse in on itself like a dying star. So why do it? Why forgive? It can't heal you; it won't save you or the other person; it can't make you a good person - at least not all by itself - because that's not what forgiveness is designed to do. Forgiveness is designed to set you free. When you say, "I forgive you," what you're really saying is, "I know what you did. It's not okay, but I recognize that you are more than that. I don't want to hold us captive to this thing anymore. I can heal myself, and I don't need anything from you." After you say that, and you mean it, then it's just you. No chains, no prisoners. Just the good, the bad and the ugly of whoever that person was from the start. Our culture thinks that vengeance is freedom, but it is a total prison. Any act of violence, whether it's emotional or physical, is this weird, twisted form of intimacy. That's why the Greeks said that a death by a good man was a good death. Think about it. Every time somebody thinks about my mom and my brother, they think about the fact that they're not here, and then they think about the kid who did this. That one act of violence actually bound the three of them together in people's minds for eternity. When we choose vengeance, we're actually signing a blood oath to chain our story to our enemies for the rest of time. Forgiveness is the only real path to freedom. But to get free, you have to get super specific about what exactly it is that you're forgiving because you cannot forgive something that didn't happen to you. In my research, I came across this idea from Judaism that hit me in the chest. In Judaism, the family can't forgive murderers, because they were not killed. They can only forgive the pain, anguish and grief that the loss caused them. This was a total jackpot moment for me. I had to compartmentalize my damage: not what happened to mom and Jim, not what happened to my family, not what happened to society, what happened to me. This is why justice often feels really cold for victims. It's justice's job to assess what is owed. And it is the criminal justice system's job to assess what is owed to society. Not to victims. It is up to us to get really clear, individually, on what we are owed. You can't forgive your father for beating your mother. You can only forgive him for how sad, alienated and angry that made you feel. I couldn't forgive him for killing mom and Jim. I'm still here. I had to assess my damages. The wedding that I had without the two of them. The parts of me that my husband and kids will never get to understand without knowing the two of them. The way my life was supposed to start at 22, and he broke it. My inherent sense of safety and belonging, which, I got to be honest, I don't think are coming back. Those are my damages. Most of us avoid forgiveness like the plague because we do not want to look at our wounds. Wounds are scary, they are nasty, they are icky, it is why most of us look away when we donate blood. It is way easier to take all of that emotion and channel it into rage at another person. I got to be honest with you, I say: do it. (Laughter) You thought this would be about forgiveness, huh? It's an important part of the process. Anger is important; it is the fire that cauterizes our wounds and lets them scar over and heal. Too much anger, and yes, you'll get third-degree burns. Without a little bit of heat, you'll never scar over, and you'll never know exactly what happened to you. If you don't know what happened to you, you can't know what you're forgiving. But once you know what's happened to you, it's time for some good old-fashioned justice. Sorry, I married a Texan. (Laughter) So what in justice's name am I owed? An apology? An explanation? A front-row seat to their torture chamber? Maybe - not the last part - but maybe you are owed those things in general. Nine times out of ten, if you ask for those things, you will get them. Which is why forgiveness is not the right thing in most situations. Forgiveness is only right when waiting for what we're owed comes at too high a cost. In all those years, with that guy chained to my side, I got a lot done. I went to grad school, I married a wonderful man, I started a career that I honestly really love. But I did it all a little more slowly, and I wasn't just dragging him along, I was dragging my mother and brother in the process, twisting the three of them up together in those chains. Pretty soon, that little posse started to crowd me out of my own body and my own experience. And one day, losing myself in order to punish him and keep the two of them alive felt like too high a cost to bear. It was there, in that crossroads, when I knew what had happened to me. I knew what I was owed, and I decided than choosing myself was more important than being right. That's when I was ready to forgive. So I stepped away from Google, and I didn't ask any more questions, and I wrote him a letter. I tore unused pages out of my mom's journals, actually, and I wrote. I told him that what happened on December 19th, 2008, was not okay and would probably never be okay for either of us. But just because it wasn't okay, that didn't mean he owed me anything - not an apology, not an explanation, not his role as my villain. I told him that I hated to be reduced to one thing that happened to me one day. I yearned to be more, to be whole, and I didn't think that I could do that if I looked at another person and reduced him to one thing he did one day and made evil the sum of its parts. I told him that I wished him a lifetime full of healing and that I forgave him. Then, without thinking, I plopped that letter into a mailbox on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Church. For the first 10 steps, there was this lightness of being, and then that lightness started to feel like a lurch in your stomach, when you hit the spiritual tripwire. My chest unwound, it burst, and suddenly, I was alone with myself. I mean, really alone, giving birth to a stranger, saying hello to a girl that I hadn't spoken to in seven years. (Sighs) Sometimes I miss him. (Laughter) Not him, the monster that I created. Things were a lot harsher and black and white, but they were a lot simpler when I had a villain to fight, and more familiar. As long as he