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posted by martyb on Thursday May 09 2019, @06:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the Next-target-for-DeepMind? dept.

"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


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Taibhsear on Thursday May 09 2019, @07:38PM

    by Taibhsear (1464) on Thursday May 09 2019, @07:38PM (#841500)

    To be fair, no one is forcing you to play tournaments for money. Most casual groups don't care about proxies unless it's your entire deck or something you'd literally never have as a new player (Black Lotus, etc.) Plus you never play with the really expensive cards, even in sleeves. You stick those bad boys in a hard case, stick em on a shelf, and print proxies of them to play with. If you want to play on the cheap with real cards look into Pauper format. There's tons of super powerful cards that are common ($0.10-0.50 each).

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