"Machine learning? Uh, writing programs to do this sort of thing takes local years and years to learn. But lots of programs you don't actually have to know what's going on under the surface, there are probably some where you'd literally just click the patterns you like and it'd make guesses off those and you could get it better at guessing - I'm doing something in between that -"

"Huh. What other things is it good for besides designing mushrooms?"

"All kinds of things - like, in particular, if you have lots of data and you want to notice patterns in it, you know there are some, but you don't have guesses about how the pattern'll show up in the data - like, if you were trying to teach a computer to recognize people. You know what people look like, but you don't know what to tell a computer to look for, but you can show it lots of people and not-people and let it figure it out. Or if we wondered if various kinds of scanner detect anything about magics, but we don't actually understand how to interpret the scanner output, we could teach the computer what results in the scanners magics produce."

"Huh. Well, magics are pretty visually distinctive - they're full of weird stuff - but I don't know if they... emit anything. Besides ambulatory weird stuff."

"And it might not be very important to check and if it were it might be obvious. But if we wanted to figure it out for some reason and it wasn't obvious we could feed the computer the data and it could figure it out."

"Cool."

"Yeah. Anyway, there are lots of procedural generation engines where you don't need to know anything about what's going on for the computer."

"How's it doing on mushrooms so far?"

He shows her some proposed mushrooms!

"Yours're prettier."

"Yeah, I know. It'll get there eventually, though."

"Neat. Dinner?"

Dinner!

Yum. "You're much better at making food than I am, and I used to do it a lot."

"I cheat." Rather gleefully.

"You do. And it's delicious."

"I can just make whatever some really fancy restaurant somewhere is making, if I want."

"Is that what you've been doing?"

"No, I've been making things Boots likes. But I could."

"Boots has good taste. I've never been to a restaurant so I wouldn't know what to suggest, anyway."

"I think Bells mostly like the same things. Not sure though."

"I'm also not a very picky eater."

"Slavery is stupid and we're going to end it."

"...yes, that too, is that related somehow?"

"Is it related to not being a picky eater?"