Chapter 8: The Map
The throne room erupted in gasps and side-conversations in hushed tones. The king sat in silence, staring at the man who just revealed that a monster had turned the tide of a major battle in favor of his kingdom.
Eventually the room quieted down as all eyes turned to the motionless king who continued to sit on his throne, stoically gazing at Lord Davidson. Vulp noticed her group looking back and forth at one another, probing for an idea as to how they could break this awkward silence. At the sound of clothes rustling, they all turned back to the king and saw him standing.
He paced back and forth on his raised platform, no longer paying attention to anyone around him. A few times he stopped, closed his eyes, mouthed some words silently to himself, then opened his eyes and continued pacing. After a minute or so, he stepped over to a nearby door and exited the throne room.
Once again, everyone looked back and forth, unsure of what to do. The room was oddly quiet until suddenly a loud noise drew everyone’s attention to the door. Various banging and crashing noises, as though someone was smashing things, echoed from beyond the closed door.
One young member of the royal guard took a step toward the door in alarm, but a fellow member of the guard placed a hand on his shoulder to stop the younger guard all while shaking his own head back and forth. Everyone waited another minute or so while listening to the racket. They perked up when they noticed the loud noises cease.
The door creaked open, revealing a somewhat flushed king. He plopped himself down on the throne again and resumed the conversation. “I’m sorry, I think I might have misheard you. How did you say you obtained the enemy’s written orders?”
Lord Davidson hesitated, unsure of how to respond. The Guild Master answered instead.
“It is as you heard, your Majesty. The bat-type monster spotted by the soldiers must have been carrying out the will of that dungeon master. I find it hard to conceive of any other possible explanation.”
“You… mean to say the dungeon master not only commands well-organized armies of monsters, but he can utilize his followers well enough to intercept enemy battle plans and deposit them into the lap of a territorial lord?”
“That appears to be the case.”
“There’s just one reason why I find this all absolutely impossible to believe.”
“Sir?”
“Even if I accept that a monster, intelligent as any human, has full control over the resources of one—no, two dungeons, how could it possibly react so swiftly to changing situations?”
“I’m not quite—“
“How could it know everything that is happening, when it is happening, and where it is happening? How could it issue orders to all its followers so fast? From what you’ve told me, its ability to react to a changing situation is uncanny.”
“It is a mystery, your Majesty.”
“Is this creature omniscient? Can it tell the future? Is it watching us right now?”
“Sir, I advise against panic. I hardly think that right now we are—“
“ARE YOU WATCHING!?” the king shouted to the throne room. “Creature! If what I’ve heard is true, then I must reward you too! Come, show yourself so that I may honor you! What do you desire!? Treasures!? Worship!? Do you want the princess’ hand in marriage!? The prince’s!?”
There was no response.
The king turned to speak once again with the man in priestly robes. “Can you think of anything else it might want?”
“Tax-exempt status,” was all he said.
The king’s head jerked back. “Tax…exempt?” Not receiving any further reply, he turned to face forward again. “You hear that!? Show yourself and I’ll exempt you from all taxes!”
After another twenty seconds of silence, Lord Davidson finally spoke up again. “Sir, when I return to the Twin Cities, I’ll work with the Guild to find out what the creature’s intentions are.”
“Good, do that,” the king agreed. “I can’t have us indebted to a monster, lest it have license to further influence our kingdom’s direction. Speaking of which, I need everyone’s input into our opening salvo in negotiations with the Union. Everyone.”
The king gestured for the people observing the festivities until now to step forward. They began a spirited discussion about how to demand reparations, concessions, and all sorts of other admissions of guilt from the Nar Union. Chief among their planning was an objective to obtain a written agreement from the Zarakhelese Empire that the Nar Union’s invasion on the Holy State was unjust. Although the Empire was seeing internal friction recently, both the Emperor in the Empire’s north and the disobedient lords further south were highly likely to offer support on this matter.
“Your Majesty, this is an opportunity,” one noble advised. “Tomorrow, we are going to discuss final planning for the project to connect all cities throughout the Holy State with paved roadways. As you know, the quantities of crushed stone and pavers required is enormous. The project is much more likely to succeed if the Union provides some assistance.”
“Ah, yes,” said the king. “I’d almost forgotten about that with everything going on. Can someone bring in that map?”
Lord Davidson glanced over his shoulder at all the exhausted members of his party, struggling to stay awake in their chairs by this point. “Your Majesty, now that we have come to an agreement on how to engage the Union, could we resume the planning for these domestic issues tomorrow? I fear those behind me will need to rest after our long journey.”
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The king looked past Lord Davidson, glancing at each member of the group, including Vulp. “Hm, fine, we’ll adjourn. After we have a look at the map.”
“Yes, your Majesty.” Lord Davidson would have preferred to adjourn right now, but at least they were close.
A few minutes later, two men carried a large map into the room and laid it out on a table. The king and other senior advisors stood around the map, pointing to different regions of the country and discussing what type and width of road was warranted.
The eastern part of the Holy State was easy to equip with roads. All it needed was one road proceeding west out of the Twin Cities toward the western regions of the nation. A second road would soon split off and bring travelers southwest to the city of Ibredh. For the time being, there was no need to pave the route toward adjoining nations.
The western regions were more challenging. The Holy State’s shape was similar to a triangle, with the eastern region being narrow and the western region having great thickness. Towns and cities dotted the landscape, with no obvious route or path for traversing all the settlements. Connecting every hamlet to every other with roadways was too expensive and inefficient. The map being discussed was a first attempt to lay out a plan for which towns to connect via roads, how robust to make each segment of road, how wide to make each road, and other similar considerations.
In addition, planners had attempted to timeline the effort, with a goal of building early roads that would ease the effort to transport supplies to other areas where roads would be built. The national strategy to centralize this entire effort had the potential to greatly reduce the total time and cost of the project. The Union paying for part of it wouldn’t hurt either.
“This area here is horribly inefficient,” another noble complained, pointing to the southwest region of the country. "A hub and spoke model does not make sense. While this fishing village would benefit from having more direct access to the five neighboring towns, it would make more sense to connect these four towns in a line and then run one, or two roads at best, connecting the village to the rest.”
“You’re right,” another noble concurred. “And if we use the existing model, we’ll need to install two river crossings over here instead of one.” The discussion continued like this for a while.
The king interrupted. “Good, I like the proposals so far. Let’s adjourn and let our guests get some rest. We’ll resume work tomorrow on this as well as the other issues facing our nation right now.” He exited the throne room back through the door he’d originally used during his tantrum. Others began filing out of the throne room at the other end.
Vulp stepped up the map, finally able to get close. She didn’t really have any involvement in the project, but she thought the idea of deciding where to build sophisticated roads all around the kingdom was interesting enough.
“Oh? Interested in this?” Lord Davidson asked her as he approached. “The Twin Cities doesn’t really need to worry about this. We’ll get an improved road for traveling west either way, so I’ve been leaving it up to the other lords and bureaucrats to argue about the best plan.”
“Oh.” Vulp wasn’t going to insist her delegation get more involved or anything. She simply inspected the map, taking advantage of the opportunity to see where everything in the country was located as well as how it would all likely be connected by roads in the future.
“Although,” Lord Davidson continued, “if you have any good ideas for changes, bring them with you tomorrow.”
“I’m going to be here tomorrow?”
“Ah, we haven’t discussed that, have we? It’s true that normally you and most of the others who received recognition today wouldn’t need to be here for tomorrow’s meetings. In fact, most of you won’t be.”
Vulp couldn’t imagine she had anything to offer at a meeting among lords and the king about national projects and other issues of high importance.
“But I think I’ll have you accompany us. You may learn useful things by observing, and the award ceremony showed everyone else that you have earned the right to be present, at least. I doubt anyone will object so long as you don’t get in the way. And…” He gestured toward the map. “If you have any proposals that are accepted, it will reflect well on both you and me. Tell, you what…”
Lord Davidson received permission to take the map with him for the evening provided they brought it back the next day. He then signaled for Vulp and one of his attendants to roll it up and carry it out of the throne room.
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That evening, Vulp found herself sharing a room with a giant map of the kingdom. She’d lost interest in it soon after finishing up her inspection of it, not having come up with any notable recommendations for how to revise it. However, DM, who had been observing her the whole evening, found the map fascinating. It was basically a big math problem. What’s the most efficient way to lay out a network of roads for an entire country? Obviously, it depends on a variety of factors, but it just so happened that the map had many of those factors laid out in gory detail. It showed the sources of building materials, estimated traffic from every point to practically every other point, expected population growth for the foreseeable future, tendencies for one-way versus two-way flow through each domain, places where severe weather was more likely to destroy infrastructure, and several other considerations.
Despite the years of effort that likely went into compiling all this information, the country’s leadership didn’t seem to have a good way to come up with an optimized solution. Likely, they would overdesign the hell out of the road network in order to accomplish the stated objectives, wasting a tremendous amount of resources in the process. This waste would weaken the nation as a whole, whether or not the Union was providing assistance.
DM wanted to know what the optimal plan looked like. Of course, the best solution could change depending on exactly how you interpreted some of the information provided on the map, but anything he could come up with would likely be a big improvement over the draft version being discussed earlier that evening. His version would be better not because he was smarter than the nobles, but rather because he had a fully-functional artificial intelligence at his disposal. Weeks ago, he had reproduced an A* search algorithm using the dungeon console’s built-in coding environment. It had even helped him design some puzzles for Daphne’s group to solve.
In his previous life, he had worked on a free online course teaching basic artificial intelligence using computer programming. Following the course’s guidance, he coded a program that searched for an optimal solution to a mathematical problem. He’d only ever used the tool as an artificial intelligence to play games before—not to solve real-life problems like this one. He still remembered the first time he was experimenting with game artificial intelligence and actually lost to his own program in a simple game. He was both proud and mortified at the time.
The program, both in his old life and in this new one, worked by performing a uniform-cost search using trial-and-error combined with applying a heuristic, that is, a scoring system for grading each trial against how closely it matches the final objective of the search to prioritize which solution to explore next. DM set to work adjusting his code in order to apply a heuristic. He decided to make a list of every city or town and, for each one, create a more detailed list of their quantitative needs. Each time a city’s need was met, the search algorithm would check off that item and improve the score of the working solution. However, adding more roads, or wider roads, or more robust roads, or requiring transporting building materials over dirt roads rather than completed roads, would increase cost. If DM set up his program correctly, the console, with its incredible computing power, would be able to determine the road network design that accomplishes all the project’s objectives while using the minimum amount of resources.
It took him several hours to digitize the map and all of the cities’ individual needs. Vulp had fallen asleep well before then, but thankfully close enough to the map that DM could still see it. Once he finished importing the problem into the console and adapting his code to this particular problem, it only took the console a second or so to spit out an answer.