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Somehow I highly doubt Magic is the most complex played game in the world. For instance there are many different card games, what's to say Magic is more comple

by lawn 8y ago

Somehow I highly doubt Magic is the most complex played game in the world. For instance there are many different card games, what's to say Magic is more complex than them?

dagw 8y ago
Basically their argument is that in all those other games determining the optimal strategy is computable (in the computer science sense) while MTG is the only non-computable real world game they could find. If that is a valid definition of a 'complex' game is left as an exercise to the reader.
UncleMeat 8y ago
Complex in a cs sense. Chess is fully computable. Magic is not.
stellaathena 8y ago
Did you actually read the paper? There's a mathematical definition of complexity that is used, and on that metric it is shown to be far harder than any other previously analyzed game.
- lawn 8y ago
  Yes. The paper is good, the title of the submission was not. Of course by now the title and even the submission link has completely changed (it was linked to an article before).
CryoLogic 8y ago
I actually believe it may be the hardest card game to compute. Magic has been around since 1993, and releases new cards every year. There are currently > 15,000 unique cards in the game. When playing, you don't know what the next card drawn will be. You also don't know what is in your opponents hand. In poker for example, there is a very small pool of possible top decks and hands. Search trees in Magic (especially "eternal" formats that allow you to pick cards from any expansion) would be too massive to compute. These cards are not vanilla either (not just statpools) - they contain over 100 categorical effects and many of them have unique effects. I'd guess at least 1000 have unique effects and interactions. Add on to that the fact that magic is both a pro-active and re-active card game. In most card games (aka hearthstone for example) you cast cards on your turn. In Magic you can cast many cards "in response" e.g. counterspells. You can also just play some cards on opponents turn. Beyond this the game is split into a number of phases and card timing by phase is very important. Sometimes you want to cast on end step vs combat - the same spell does the same thing but might be much lower risk depending on the phase.

by lawn 8y ago

Somehow I highly doubt Magic is the most complex played game in the world. For instance there are many different card games, what's to say Magic is more complex than them?

dagw 8y ago

Basically their argument is that in all those other games determining the optimal strategy is computable (in the computer science sense) while MTG is the only non-computable real world game they could find. If that is a valid definition of a 'complex' game is left as an exercise to the reader.

UncleMeat 8y ago

Complex in a cs sense. Chess is fully computable. Magic is not.

stellaathena 8y ago

Did you actually read the paper? There's a mathematical definition of complexity that is used, and on that metric it is shown to be far harder than any other previously analyzed game.

lawn 8y ago
Yes. The paper is good, the title of the submission was not. Of course by now the title and even the submission link has completely changed (it was linked to an article before).

CryoLogic 8y ago

I actually believe it may be the hardest card game to compute. Magic has been around since 1993, and releases new cards every year. There are currently > 15,000 unique cards in the game. When playing, you don't know what the next card drawn will be. You also don't know what is in your opponents hand. In poker for example, there is a very small pool of possible top decks and hands. Search trees in Magic (especially "eternal" formats that allow you to pick cards from any expansion) would be too massive to compute. These cards are not vanilla either (not just statpools) - they contain over 100 categorical effects and many of them have unique effects. I'd guess at least 1000 have unique effects and interactions. Add on to that the fact that magic is both a pro-active and re-active card game. In most card games (aka hearthstone for example) you cast cards on your turn. In Magic you can cast many cards "in response" e.g. counterspells. You can also just play some cards on opponents turn. Beyond this the game is split into a number of phases and card timing by phase is very important. Sometimes you want to cast on end step vs combat - the same spell does the same thing but might be much lower risk depending on the phase.