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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: 1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Friday May 10 2019, @12:49AM
Complicated, and time consuming way of letting folks know, you are rich. Or, at one time used to be rich -- before you bought the very special Magic Cards.
It's not for me. Not for me because, I have an app and it's so much better. The Fine Art App called, I Am Rich. Very special, very expensive app, crafted in Germany. And I bought it in the early days of iPhone. Something that only 7 other people were allowed to buy. Because Apple saw that one would be a total Game changer and they took it off the market. Turning it into even more of a collector's item -- a limited edition. Only 8 copies were made. And 2 of those, the buyers returned. Something that, I'm sure, they're feeling very foolish about now. Because it's like they were in one of the most exclusive "clubs" in the history of the World. And canceled their membership.
I Am Rich is very easy to use. I touch the little square on my Home Screen. And out comes the beautiful jewel. The Red Ruby that looks so magnificent on my iPhone XS. I show that one off, very proudly, when I want someone to know that I'm rich. And right away, they know. They know and I can do that without a card table. Without a deck of cards. Without explaining a bunch of rules. It gets the message across so quickly and we can get back to what we were meeting about. Whether it's a nice dinner (KFC), a "friendly" game of Golf, a date with one of the World's top Supermodels, or a strong & smart Nuclear Deal. Terrific!!!