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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 Thursday May 09 2019, @07:02PM (4 children)
How much would one have to spend to play Magic the Gathering at those levels of complexity?
Comparatively, is Hearthstone growing in complexity faster? With Blizzard driving it, I can see Wild mode Hearthstone eclipsing most card games in complexity just due to the sheer manpower driving it.
Also: is massive complexity really a good thing? I heartily agree with the Hearthstone philosophy of Standard mode where you are limited to "just" the classic plus last two years of cards.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 09 2019, @08:53PM
It should be possible to play a digital version of the game, or even with counterfeit cards. I know there is a digital version of MTG, but I don't know if they have filled it with microtransactions or grind. But fundamentally, all the rules and card info are known and can be replicated. And they had to do that to compute the game for this research.
I suspect it's cheaper than ever to play the game as a cheapskate, since you can just play online multiplayer MTG, but it sounds like bzipitidoo knows more than I do (see below).
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(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday May 10 2019, @04:28PM (1 child)
Specifically concerning the Turing-complete aspect, I hear that Hearthstone and Yu-Gi-Oh have a limit on how much board state you can accumulate in one game (max of X minions in play per player). Magic has no such restrictions, and there are decks that can generate arbitrary numbers of tokens in play.
Would have to look up how many new sets HS releases per year...MtG keeps it up at a pretty good clip. 4 Standard sets a year, and 2-4 others depending on how you count.
MtG has an equivalent format called Vintage, where nearly all cards from the game's history are legal to play.
Like above, MtG had Standard long before HS ever existed. And yes, Standard is the big cash cow for WOTC, as that's basically the only way they make money: players opening packs of the last couple sets. It's the easiest format to get into, but after awhile you realize that rotation making your deck illegal every year makes Modern (most sets back to 2003) more affordable long-term, since it doesn't rotate.
Deck prices of course climb as you go into older formats, but realistically nobody really plays Legacy or Vintage in paper, just online.
Standard - $60-$600
Modern - $100-$1,700
Legacy - $1,100-$6,000
Vintage - $6,000-$30,000
source [mtggoldfish.com]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 12 2019, @03:09AM
Funny, I never paid a cent for Hearthstone (Blizzard has gotten enough of my money other ways - I took it as a philosophical point to play without pay), but... the grind effort required as the decks rotated out eventually helped convince me to quit.
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(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday May 12 2019, @01:28AM
Somewhere below Dragon Poker, I'd guess.