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Magic: the Gathering is Turing Complete and more likely to hold high schooler's attention.

MTG in my mind is pretty limited.

You might want to revise that view: http://www.toothycat.net/~holo...

In the discussion on this site I assemble a Universal Turing Machine from Magic: the Gathering cards.

" a game-changing intellectual endeavour achieved by applying sustained effort to original insights afforded by superlative mastery of one or more subjects gained through outstanding intelligence and endless learning. "

Nah, teach them Magic: the Gathering. Time-tested fun game and unlike Robot Turtles, it *is* Turing complete!

For anybody who missed it; this is extremely tongue-in-cheek; while MtG can in fact be made Turing complete, it requires an extremely complicated initial state involving a lot of cards and rule edge-cases that many players will never see.

Of course, now that I think about it, the suggestion has some merit after all. M:tG is not a good game for teaching programming, but it *does* have logic elements - coming up with things like infinite mana combos and such is fun even when they're utterly impractical - and it is, in fact, fun. The same third-grade teacher who gave us logic grid puzzles as assignments (I'm sure there's a better name for them, but I haven't seen one in years) also taught any kid who was interested to play M:tG (with Beta cards, no less... I wonder if she still has those?)

If MtG is Turing Complete (and it is, see link below) that would imply there is theoretically no optimum strategy because you could have two turing machines playing an arbitrarily complicated program against each other and the only way to solve the halting problem is to run the game... correct or not?

Or maybe another way to phrase it is two Turing machines could play an unsolved / unsolvable problem, like maybe a hard AI algorithm, against each other using MtG cards?

Of course proving an unsolvable strategy exists is pretty far from proving a simpler solved strategy exists or not.

http://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/index.html

I don't know enough MtG to understand the link but it looks interesting.

As the site points out in its about page, no less.

Abstract

Fluid intelligence (Gf) refers to the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge. Gf is critical for a wide variety of cognitive tasks, and it is considered one of the most important factors in learning. Moreover, Gf is closely related to professional and educational success, especially in complex and demanding environments. Although performance on tests of Gf can be improved through direct practice on the tests themselves, there is no evidence that training on any other regimen yields increased Gf in adults. Furthermore, there is a long history of research into cognitive training showing that, although performance on trained tasks can increase dramatically, transfer of this learning to other tasks remains poor. Here, we present evidence for transfer from training on a demanding working memory task to measures of Gf. This transfer results even though the trained task is entirely different from the intelligence test itself. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the extent of gain in intelligence critically depends on the amount of training: the more training, the more improvement in Gf. That is, the training effect is dosage-dependent. Thus, in contrast to many previous studies, we conclude that it is possible to improve Gf without practicing the testing tasks themselves, opening a wide range of applications.

A card version of the memory task used in their research is available at: http://www.toothycat.net/wiki/wiki.pl?DouglasReay/SnapBackGameRules

Plug in a yacc-style parse tree generator, and users can write things like this or this..

Plug in a yacc-style parse tree generator, and users can write things like this or this..

He sure was a hoopy frood.

Aaaaaarrrggghh! IMHO, one of the worst mistakes DA ever made in THHGTG was to make the NOUN "hoopy" sound like an adjective: it's a NOUN, people:

Hoopy: really together guy

Well, actually...

It does seem to be yet another shift of burden of proof onto the consumer though, does it not?

Have you noticed all the online banking EULA's with specific "you're liable for anything until you report your password as breached"? Much in the same way as "Chip and Pin" here in the UK, the shift in the responsibility of fraud onto the customer of these systems is designed for the benefit of the BANKS, any benefit to you is a secondary concern and it seems to be that its actually to your detriment in many cases.

Interestingly, who is it that oversees the fraud of these systems to determine whether they're secure or not? Why, it's the same banks that run them. Hardly independent or unbiased now, is it? That's like asking Adobe, "is your PDF encryption secure?" Hmm, what do you think... *cough* ROT-13 *cough*

Let's use an example of something like Chip and Pin, where instead of a signature you type in a pin along with your credit card transaction. This is vulnerable to multiple attacks, e.g. shoulder-surfing: say someone watches your pin, then steals your card and goes on a shopping spree -- the transactions are all valid as they had the correct pin, so YOU are responsible for this loss. Compare this to the old signature method, they might fool the store cashier, but when you report it you get your money back -- problem is, it's costly for the credit card companies to check and they (or the retailer) ends up paying out. The cost and burden of proof is on THEM, and they don't like that. Other examples of abuse would include dummy card readers and pin input devices, corrupt shops who capture pins, etc. For an interesting discussion on this see here:
http://toothycat.net/wiki/wiki.pl?ChipAndPin

So, while I totally agree that users have to bear a certain amount of responsibility, much in the same way as Chip and Pin, until internet banking can be made more secure *by the banks themselves* to the extent that phishing scams and other fraudulent methods are overcome AND the burden of proof is *kept with the banks* then I, for one, will not use them. (Removes tin-foil hat!)

I had something of a braindump along these lines a little while ago here - mainly the techie bits of how one might go about writing something like this without any of the users falling foul of UK legislation if any of the *other* users store material on their hard drives via the system. It kinda petered out due to lack of interest, though.

Do you see any way in which readers of a future version of the Wikipedia could choose for themselves on an individual basis who they trust, and be presented with an edited view of the data based on that preference?

This might require third order mediated trust

I've written to the five main parties contesting my region (the Eastern region of the UK). So far I've only had a reply from UKIP, who don't appear to have a policy on software patents, although they might have a policy this term of voting against every single piece of legislation put before the Parliament. Edited text of reply.