“Real ‘magic’ was never a thing, of course —”

“But magic mushrooms were, and they can make people see lots of crazy stuff!”

“Very amusing. But you have a point; a lot of it was herbalism. Plenty of medicinal ingredients to be found in the natural world.”

“But now, you and your group are interested in partnering with the computer science department?”

“We just want to research emergent behaviour of systems, complexity, tipping points, that sort of thing.”

“Right, I can see how that might apply. A small change in initial conditions causes a huge variance in final outcome…”

“Like using a lever as a force multiplier, except drawing on latent ambient energy. We think there might be a grain of truth in some of the stories about magic.”

“Well, we can probably give you some supercomputer time, and a couple of grad students to write code. You really think you’ll be able to prove anything?”

The wizard shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”