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Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete

arxiv.org

101–110 of 194 posts

Re: Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete

#102
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK 60 the minimum number of cards you have to put in your deck, but (at the least at the times) there was not a maximum number. 20k is the number of unique cards, but you can put as much as 4 copies of the same card in your deck for the vast majority of cards. You can also put as many "normal" lands as you wish in your deck.

And at least there is a card that can be insert an unlimited amount of times and it is not a land. So technically, the combinations are infinite.

Presumably there is an optimal Island / Persistant Petitioners only deck ratio against a dumb opponent who does nothing but draw a card a turn and play a land.

I wonder if it's irrational?

Re: Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete

#104
post #98
post #3

erm "Though similar to role-playing fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragons" No MTG is not at all similar to role playing games.

if my nerd history is correct - MTG almost killed dungeons and dragons in the 90's!

Did it? I sort of thought the 90's death of D&D was more of the hangover of the 'devil worshipping' accusations of the 80's finally hitting.

That and D&D being associated with all things nerd, which was very out of vogue through the 90's.

Re: Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete

#105
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if my nerd history is correct - MTG almost killed dungeons and dragons in the 90's!

Did it? I sort of thought the 90's death of D&D was more of the hangover of the 'devil worshipping' accusations of the 80's finally hitting. That and D&D being associated with all things nerd, which was very out of vogue through the 90's.

It definitely took a lot of attention at my local game shop away from traditional table top role playing.

Re: Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete

#107
post #22

I guess this is newsworthy because a paper was put on arXiv, but the result has been known for a while. See e.g. this submission a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15712377

No it hasnt. This is a new result that requires no choices by either player. It is in the paper.

Re: Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete

#109

Basic question but what does being Turing complete actually signify? I get the concept but don't know why it matters.

General and obvious answer: That means something can (theoretically) compute on it’s own, on the highest computing level.

Personal importance: something like mgtg and duplo train tracks, which isn’t intended to build a Turing computer, is used to build one, it’s challenging and a creative outlet of tech knowledge. My favorite example is red stone in Minecraft.

Re: Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete

#110
post #50

While this paper shows that a player can create a game state where deciding the game result is Turing-complete, it does not show that doing so is an optimal strategy under any circumstance (in particular, the setup requires a starting situation where the player can just win the game instead of performing the setup). So it seems perfectly possible (and in fact highly likely) that this result does not hold if players p…

In game playing theory, an optimal strategy is a function that takes any state and tells you the proper next move. It does not matter how you got there

For MTG strategy to be computable you must be able to compute whether entering this computation is a good choice, which requires solving the halting problem.

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