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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @01:52PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @01:52PM (#841820)

    The complexity arise from the low probability of getting a good card in a sea of cheap low tier cards. Feel sorry for the ones hooked into this complex scam.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Friday May 10 2019, @04:03PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Friday May 10 2019, @04:03PM (#841889)

    Smart people don't buy packs unless they're drafting. You just buy singles online.

    I still don't really understand why draft is such a big format, when you pay $12 to make a deck out of worse cards, and the deck itself is even smaller so more high-variance besides what you actually manage to pick.

    But people opening packs fuels the singles market, so hey. The chumps are necessary.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"