Game night 1
Rollie meets three other friends for game night.
They play games for a few hours, then eat, then play more.
George is DM. Retired teacher. Ivan, Rollie, Steve were all students.
Rollie (main character)
Steve hates his job in finance. Has an on and off relationship with a girl that is not a good influence.
Jason is quiet. Kind of a meta gamer. Really just there as an excusee to give background.
George the DM describes the campaign
Where the heroes have to secretly stop a scheme to dig up an old relic deep below the city.
The relic traps an evil entity, and in the wrong hands, could be very powerful. It was hidden deep in the caves. If the relic is destroyed, the evil entity escapes.
The evil entity has been in contact with the mind of an ambitious young cleric. The cleric believes he can dig up the relic and use the evil entity for the greater good.
If word gets out about the relic's location, others will seek it out. And it can't be destroyed without letting the evil spirit out.
When pizza arrives, they take a break
While eating, Rollie he explains how there is a section of the software system that is just the compiled code (written in assembly) that somehow discovers nearly optimal solutions to scheduling puzzles, but nobody alive understands how it works.
Rollie says something like "If I gave you a copy of the old testament, written in ancient hebrew, and a hebrew dictionary, how long would it take you to figure out how the Israelites made it out of Egypt?"
"And even better -- this section is like 3x the length of the old testament, and I'm not sure, but I think some of it was written by the program itself...."
Rollie explains how he creates simulations and then runs copies of the system inside these simulations and then studies how it interacts with the environment. The system doesn't behave consistently. Sometimes,it shows evidence of memory. Other times, it doesn't.
So at Rollie's day job, the new president brings in consultants and the consultants want to replace the system that Rollie manages, and nobody believes or listens to Rollie when he explains how nobody alive could ever replace this thing.
George describes campaign where they
Back to the game
While playing, Jason says the party should go to the tavern for information. Steve asks if they should go because this is a George campaign or if in fact tavern keepers were actually information hubs.
Steve, while eating pizza, "I mean, we could all go to the barber shop instead and get haircuts, or go to the bathhouses instead, right?"