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"Magic: The Gathering" is officially the world's most complex game
Magic: The Gathering is a card game in which wizards cast spells, summon creatures, and exploit magic objects to defeat their opponents. In the game, two or more players each assemble a deck of 60 cards with varying powers. They choose these decks from a pool of some 20,000 cards created as the game evolved. Though similar to role-playing fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragons, it has significantly more cards and more complex rules than other card games.
And that raises an interesting question: among real-world games (those that people actually play, as opposed to the hypothetical ones game theorists usually consider), where does Magic fall in complexity?
Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Alex Churchill, an independent researcher and board game designer in Cambridge, UK; Stella Biderman at the Georgia Institute of Technology; and Austin Herrick at the University of Pennsylvania.
His team has measured the computational complexity of the game for the first time by encoding it in a way that can be played by a computer or Turing machine. "This construction establishes that Magic: The Gathering is the most computationally complex real-world game known in the literature," they say.
Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete (arXiv:1904.09828)
Related: How Magic the Gathering Began, and Where it Goes Next
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @10:52PM
I was at a friends house for a party. The complete and utter effing wanker uni buddy of my mate saw that there were magic the gathering cards in a cupboard. I didn't know how to play. So, this effing wanker, the kind of person who spends their uni years drinking and crippling other people's chances at finishing uni, pulls a box out of the cupboard and opens it on the floor.
The owner of the cards walked in as the effing wanker was shuffling the cards. He was upset. He explained that if we wanted to play he had a couple of boxes of common cards. That the box Mr wanker had opened was a brand new still in original packaging box set he was keeping.
I knew at the time this was a fluckup. The guy did not hold this against me. So far as I know.
Now I wonder how much that pristine box of magic cards is worth.