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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: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday May 10 2019, @04:10PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Friday May 10 2019, @04:10PM (#841897)

    One of the weirdest parts is the relationship of players to piracy. I regularly used proxy cards, as they were called. Fire up the scanner and the ink jet printer, make a few copies of rare and powerful cards to tuck into the protective plastic sleeves, with a cheap common card to provide the back, and have fun. Or just write the text of the rare card on a slip of paper. But serious MtG players totally freak out over that. Tense up like you're trying to commit a heinous crime, even if it's just a casual game. I never tried using proxies at any official tournament, but I can imagine that definitely being against the rules. They seem to feel that allowing proxies devalues their collection. I suppose it does. What they don't seem to care about is that such techniques would also work for them, let them use rare and valuable cards without paying exorbitant prices. It's like they're rich, and want the "pay to win" aspect.

    With the way WOTC manages things, they tend to reprint $40+ cards that are in high demand very sparingly, so the price never comes down much (or if it does, it's only slightly, for at most a year). Combined with Chinese fakes steadily getting better, I would half like to see us reach the point where the counterfeits can pass as real just to drive the ridiculous price points down.

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