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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: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 10 2019, @01:21AM
Yes, and no - of course anyone can make up a more complex game, but will anyone play it?
~20 years ago, if you put up an e-mail server, you could collect 100+ people to play almost any crappy PBeM (play by email) game, as long as it was free. However, if you cranked up the rules too far, so complicated that people felt like they couldn't compete, the user count would drop off.
I don't know what their threshold of "popular" was for the study, but I'd set it as something that has endured for 10+ years and has 1000+ identifiable active players, at a minimum.
I wonder how the game of Go fared in their analysis? Simple rules, astronomical potential outcomes. I bet if you sponsored a pro-league of Go 31x31, you'd not only get the sponsored pro players, but also quite a few enthusiasts who would actively play the even more complex game.
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