Music had started up at one end of the chamber. A music robot of random combinations of sound, harmonic colours and shades that flitted agilely. Some couples started dancing listlessly. A group of men had gathered together and were arguing.
Near the double doors a few people were seeking their wraps and wandering away, dull-faced, vacant-eyed, mouths slack with fatigue and boredom.
Verrick's deep tones boomed out over everybody else's; he was dominating an argument. People nearby stopped talking and began filtering over to listen. A tight knot of men formed, grim-faced and serious, as Verrick and Moore waxed louder and hotter.
"Our problems are of our own making," Verrick asserted. "They're not real, like problems of supply and labour surplus. This M-game was invented by a couple of mathematicians during the early phase of the Final War."
"You mean discovered," Moore said. "They saw that social situations are analogues of strategy games, like poker. A system that works in a poker game will work in a social situation, like business or war."
"What's the difference between a game of chance and a strategy game?" Laura Davis asked, from where she and Al stood.
Annoyed, Moore snapped: "Everything! In a game of chance no deception is involved; in a poker game every player has a deliberate strategy of bluff, false leads, misleading signs."
Moore turned back to Verrick. "You want to deny that society operates like a strategy game? Minimax was a brilliant hypothesis. It gave us a rational, scientific method of cracking any strategy and transforming the strategy game into a chance game, where the regular statistical methods of the exact sciences function."