book review: How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying

Django Wexler.
How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying.
Orbit. 2024

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Davi has been stuck in a time loop for centuries. Every time she dies, she wakes in a pond, and told she must save the kingdom from the Dark Lord. She has been getting better and better at doing so, but eventually the Dark Lord prevails, and Davi dies. This time, she wakes after a particularly painful death, and snaps. Rather than save the kingdom, she decides to become the Dark Lord herself! And with the power to learn that the time loop gives her, she sets out on her new quest.

Davi is a gloriously sarcastic, competent, and (mostly) moral character. Even while pursuing the goal of becoming Dark Lord, she has clearly read and follows the sensible rules in Peter Anspach’s list of The Top 100 Things I’d Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord, or, possibly more relevantly, Things I will do when I become Evil Empress, particularly in her (mostly) civilised behaviour to her minions and enemies.

After many thrilling adventures, some involving her death, Davi does finally achieve her goal (no spoiler: it’s in the title!), but what to do then? That’s for the sequel, which I am eagerly awaiting.

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After ALife

My colleague and I travelled back to Tokyo on the bullet train this morning.  I had quite a bit of time before my flight, so he suggested we visit Electric Town.  We took a local train, then searched for some empty luggage lockers so we wouldn't have to wheel suitcases around.  All the coin-operated ones we found were full.  But we did find an alternative.

A very nice gentleman took our bags and gave us a ticket.

Divested of luggage, we walked around, marvelling at the sheer variety of stores selling everything electrical, electronic, technical, cutesy twee, and much that was unidentifiable.

A huuuge multistorey shop sold large expensive items, including mega-sized TVs, bicycles, telescopes, and sharks.

I've been to specialist telescope shops with fewer items on display.

Difficult to get a scale, but this was several feet tall.

At the other extreme, there were alleyways and arcades with tiny shops selling all kinds of electronics, from small boxes full of individual resistors and transistors, to crates full of old laptops.  Everything for the hobbyist.

One shop among hundreds.

It was lightly raining and getting dark: the combination of weather and goods made me feel like I was on the set of Bladerunner.  

After that, we retrieved our luggage, and I caught a train to the airport, to wait for my just after midnight flight home.  

I like the simplicity and clarity of the airport shop names.

The end of my third trip to Japan.

ALife 2025 day 5

The final day of the conference: it's been a great event.  The day yet again started with some parallel sessions of contributed papers, and I went to the session on Cellular Automata. I was chairing the session, so couldn't take a full set of notes, but I remember the talks being interesting.

Then the final keynote, by Anna Ciaunica, a philosopher, on the importance of embodiment: why we need our toes (and the rest of our body) to think.  We associate the mind with the brain; why not with the rest of the body? Why is the brain not a part of the body? Why do we have a "Brain and Body Institute", but not a "Liver and Body Institute"?  Why do we imagine Mary in her black and white world not understanding seeing red, rather than not understanding eating a red apple?  Why do we have an adult-centric neuro-centric bias, a male embodiment bias?  Think about pregnancy, not just from the mother's point of view, but from the point of view of the embryo: pregnancy is a universal experience, we have all been inside another person.  The opposite of death isn't life, it's birth.  We should think beyond autopoiesis to co-poiesis.  Currently our philosophical tools have been mostly invented by male philosophers.  Consider a parallel world, with a Renée Descartes, who is pregnant.

Well, after that mind-altering experience, it was time for the final boxed lunch.  And then the closing ceremony, bast paper awards, and thanks to everyone!

Next year, in Waterloo! 

ALife 2025 day 4

The day again started with some parallel sessions of contributed papers: this time I went to some interesting ones on cellular automata and related topics.  Then was the day's keynote, by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, who, with colleagues at Google, is working on in silico ALife ideas.  He related some of their results to ideas of symbiogenesis from biology, with a strong dash of physical processes and lots of tasty equations.

one of Blaise's denser slides

Then another efficient lunch box distribution was followed by two further contributed paper sessions.  Here I chose one on Evolution, followed by one on Morphological computation.  Lots of interesting ideas I need to assimilate.

These were followed by a Panel session, where I was the moderator. I got to interview Emily Dolson, Dominik Chen, and Hiro Iizuka about all things ALife.  I enjoyed it; I hope the panellists and audience did too.

Then a bunch of us went to dinner.

Shop name spotted on the way back from the eatery

ALife 2025 day 3

The day started with some parallel sessions of contributed papers: I went to some interesting ones on evolution.  Then was the day's keynote, by Chris Kempes.  He covered a variety of physical constraints on living organisms: physical laws limit what life can be.  Scaling laws, metabolic rates and growth rates, the way proteins are more dilute in larger cells, the physics of the small: these are all consequences of physics, and so may be universal laws.

On to lunch, and then the excursion!  On registration, we were given a choice of several excursions to a variety of local temples.  I had little to guide my choice, except I saw the words "bamboo forest" on one, so chose that.  On the bus on the way there, the guide taught us to count to ten in Japanese (knowing what little I know of Japanese, I expect the reality is much more complicated than these ten little words!)

We walked from the bus park along a road of very touristy shops, to the temple complex.  We went in the main temple, after removing our shoes.  There was a magnificent painting of a dragon on the ceiling, with a gaze that followed you around the room, but sadly, there was also a no photography rule.  After that, shoes back on, we walked through the complex, admiring the outside of buildings, the raked gravel, and the carefully tended trees.

If you look carefully, you can see three guys up in this tree, pruning it. (Click to embiggen.)

We carried on around the garden, to a lovely lake, also carefully curated.  It's just a little too early in the year for the full spectacular autumn colours.

If you look carefully, you can see a big carp in the bottom right corner.

We carried on up around the garden, to a vista point.

Temples below, mountains in the distance, framed by trees. The tree on the right has amazing spikey leaves

spikey

On to the bamboo forest.  I wouldn't want to make my way through that; fortunately there was a nice wide path.

impenetrable

Bamboo is a kind of grass.  A special kind of grass.

a colleague providing a hand for scale

After exiting the forest, we descended back down the valley, and made our way back to the bus via an ice cream shop in the touristy road.  

The bus then took us directly to the conference dinner, held in a huuuuuge and very modern convention building.  We had a delicious buffet, and wonderful conversation.  There was a bus to take us back to the starting point, but the little group I was with decided to walk back down instead.  It made a very pleasant 30 minute stroll on a warm evening to finish off a great day.

ALife 2025 day 2

Tuesday, and the full conference gets going.  

We started with a great keynote from Hector Zenil, on using Kolmogorov Complexity measures.  Just because it is uncomputable doesn't mean it is useless.  Most of mathematics is undecidable, but that doesn't stop us using maths!  We shouldn't just give up and use simple lossless compression algorithms. We can do better, and getter better bounds, better approximations, by trying harder and harder (running the search algorithm for longer), which means we can be better at filtering out randomness from things that superficially look random, but that have algorithmic patterns.  It was a fascinating talk.  I've had Hector's book on Algorithmic Information Dynamics on my to-read pile for a while now -- I need to bump it up nearer to the top.

Then on to the contributed papers.  During one of these, on Synthetic Ecosystems, I became one of today's "Lucky 10,000", when I discovered that until relatively recently, Ascension Island was an essentially lifeless desert.  Darwin stopped there on his way home, and decided it needed "greening".  Today, after a lot of work, it has a lush, totally artificial, ecosystem!

The poster session has lots of interesting work on display, including a contribution by my student.  There were also some beautiful "Analogue Atomic Automata": large, carefully grown bismuth crystals, by Solvi Arnold:

In the evening we had a fascinating online keynote from Michael Levin, on biological embodiment, agential material, and bioengineering.  It might have been 8pm for us, but it was 7am for him!  (We live on a sphere.)

view from a Kyoto hotel window

Today was the first day of the Artificial Life conference in Kyoto.  I took the obligatory photo out of my window, then joined my colleague at breakfast.

Then off to find the conference venue, and join the registration queue (at essentially midnight UK time, but I felt fine, having slept reasonably well).  Queuing also involved saying hi to many friends and colleagues I hadn't seen since last year.  This first day was dedicated to workshops. I went to an excellent Neuroevolution tutorial in the morning.  The lunch queue was long, but moved quickly, as pre-packed food boxes were being briskly handed out.  

In the afternoon I went to a workshop on Generative ALife with a wide range of talks.  I was quite fascinated by the various talks using LLMs to implement the very simple agents in Minsky's Society of Mind.  Now, I'm an LLM mega-skeptic: these stochastic parrots are most definitely not "intelligent".  However, the whole point of SoM is that intelligence emerges from lots of unintelligent agents communicating. These researchers are using LLMs as SoM's internal agents, communicating via natural language. There are agents controlling the "mouth", which talks to/at people through a robot avatar; (these conversations still have typical "hallucination" issues), other agents are attached to the "ears", "eyes", etc, and more are just internal agents, making up the whole internal society.  In addition to the transcript of the robot/people conversations, the researchers can also get transcripts of the internal conversations between the internal agents, giving insight into how the agents are interacting to give the resulting output.  I found this an interesting novel use of these devices.

Then a bunch of us went out for dinner.

A great first day!