Slashdot Mirror


Magic: the Gathering Is Turing Complete

TsukiKage writes "A 50-card M:tG combo for four players is demonstrated that is used to construct a simple Turing machine, performing arbitrary computations just by following the rules of Magic and card text thereafter."

32 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Slashdot is for fucking losers. by evafan76 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I guess that's why you're here.

  2. I see... by NIK282000 · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...an XKCD comic in the near future.

    --
    Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
  3. Finally! by sirboxalot · · Score: 5, Funny

    A use for Carnival of Souls.

  4. Re:Magic? by evafan76 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Who in their right mind would play such obvious trash?

    Surprisingly, lots of people.

    People pull knifes on each other over Magic in my hood.

  5. Such vitriol for M:TG in these early comments by Gideon+Wells · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Like we /.ers are to talk about nerds or geekiness. Half of us would install a toaster in our cars just so we could have a toaster to install linux on while stuck in traffic. Yeesh.

    --
    by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
    1. Re:Such vitriol for M:TG in these early comments by DigiShaman · · Score: 2

      I used to play M:TG until it got all complicated with poison counters. Playing started to hurt my head after just one drink. I suppose there are people whom enjoy it all the more with their superior short-term memory capacity compared to my own. Either way, at some point a game can get so complicated that it's no longer fun to play. As always, YMMV.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    2. Re:Such vitriol for M:TG in these early comments by dcherryholmes · · Score: 2

      You should have moved on to V:TES (or Jyhad, as the old time players still call it). It was Garfield's second game, which he explicitly designed from the ground up as multiplayer instead of 1 on 1.

      A) Card rarity is linked to how many copies you'd likely want in your deck, regardless of the strength of the card (and there are no card limits).

      B) As a less mechanistic and more social game by its nature, it's quite conducive to drinking while playing, on many levels.

    3. Re:Such vitriol for M:TG in these early comments by donaggie03 · · Score: 4, Informative

      That's one of the reasons for the 2 year set rotation. Only the last 2 years worth of cards are allowed in standard play. (There's also the obvious reason of requiring people to buy more cards.) There haven't been any cards with poison counters in at least the last 2 expansions (that's when I started paying attention to the game) and I'm pretty sure there's none in the upcoming one either. The developers try new and different things to try to keep the game fresh and interesting to long time players, and it seems to be hit and miss. I think they've been fairly decent at hitting, but poison counters are a good example of a miss, afaic.

      --
      Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
    4. Re:Such vitriol for M:TG in these early comments by alzoron · · Score: 2

      The last two years have actually seen a resurgence of poison counters. Starting with the 2010 Fall Block of Scars of Mirrodin and the follow up expansion New Phyrexia in 2011 they combined the Poison and Wither mechanics together to create the Infect mechanic. Anyone that was discouraged by poison before would probably not be to happy with it more recently.

  6. Amazing by DJ+Jones · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Now this is truly "News for Nerds"

    Speaking of, what the hell happened to the motto? When did that happen?

  7. Re:Perfect example of MtG players... by Rei · · Score: 5, Funny

    This guy didn't just earn his nerd card, he earned a nerd obelisk in his front yard.

    --
    No matter how kind you are, German children are kinder.
  8. My thoughts... by madmarcel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My thoughts in order:
    - Have I got the cards to do this?
    - What cards could I substitute to achieve the same thing?
    - Could I optimize or simplify this and reduce the number of required cards?
    - Do *really* I want to sit down and figure this out?
    - Could I simulate this in one of the many (open source) mtg cardgame engines?

    1. Re:My thoughts... by AK+Marc · · Score: 3, Funny

      Does the computer run faster if you have more rare cards in the deck?

    2. Re:My thoughts... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      You have to actually read the explanation. They're manipulating cards' text with the cards "Artificial Evolution" and "Mind Bend", and then using the drill sergeant to pull the chancellor from the deck. He then dies to a combination of the ghouls + aether flash, and gets wheeled back into the library.

      Seriously, this is all in the "How it works" part of the explanation, and it does make sense. It's not something that could ever come close to happening in a normal game, but it obeys the rules if the situation were set up as described.

  9. Re:Legend unique in play by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    They have that covered with Mirror Gallery, which eliminates the Legend Rule while in play.

  10. Re:Perfect example of MtG players... by donaggie03 · · Score: 2

    This guy didn't just earn his nerd card, he earned a nerd obelisk in his front yard.

    That sounds like it could be flavor text on a magic card . .

    --
    Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
  11. Re:News for nerds by c0lo · · Score: 4, Funny

    There is a group of guys at my workplace who do it every day on their lunch hour. And not a one of them would understand this story

    Or how to make a baby.

    make baby

    As you can see above, baby making is not hard. Even the deployment, painful as it is, is an one-off per child.
    What should worry anyone is: keeping input feed at right levels and correlated with "running"/"longjump"-ing/whatever, anti-malware protection, constant patching (as in: a new iGadget to keep in sync with the other "daemons" in the scho... err... system) and all other maintenance activities.
    These letting aside no possible way of hardware upgrades for the tens of years of lifetime and not manufacturer warranty from the very first day.

    --
    Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
  12. Recursive by IorDMUX · · Score: 4, Funny

    Do you realize what this means?

    Given sufficient time and mana, we could simulate a game of Magic within a game of Magic!

    Vaguely related

    --
    >> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
    1. Re:Recursive by IorDMUX · · Score: 2

      Riiiight. I was wondering how War Mammoths fit into your master plan of altering reality.

      --
      >> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
  13. Due credit by ripper234 · · Score: 2

    It's only fair to point that this article was generated out of this question on Draw3Cards (Disclaimer: I'm the owner of D3C)

  14. Re:Hacked texts? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    What he means is that he has cards with effects like "Change the text of target card from a to b..." When he uses one of those compeltely legal cards, he refers to it as hacked. So he is using proper legal rules.

  15. Re:News for nerds by NoSleepDemon · · Score: 3, Funny

    Even worse, with the baby code base, recursion is deeply frowned upon!

  16. Re:Not so sure. by TuringTest · · Score: 3, Informative

    There *îs* a card for changing the colors in the text, and the guy's using it (and a second one to change creature type). The card modification is thus done according to the rules.

    In fact, almost any magic effect in MtG is a change in the initial rules, so that's Magic for you

    --
    Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
  17. Clarke was right by kav2k · · Score: 5, Funny

    Any sufficiently advanced technologyis indistinguishable from Magic.

  18. Re:Reminded of a line from a movie... by Tablizer · · Score: 2

    When Linux runs on Dungeons & Dragons, THEN you'll see a truly cosmic nerdgasm; a sight to behold......okay, maybe not.

  19. Re:Not so sure. by Arancaytar · · Score: 2

    almost any magic effect in MtG is a change in the initial rules

    That makes me want to see the game "Mornington Crescent: The Gathering".

  20. Re:News for nerds by arth1 · · Score: 2

    apt-get? Surely the proper way to make babby is:

    $ man woman
    $ nice date
    $ touch woman
    $ partprobe
    $ fsck
    $ sleep 23241600
    $ emerge baby

  21. Re:News for nerds by leonardluen · · Score: 2

    i think you need to run "mount" on "girlfriend" or "wife" first. and if you don't know where they are you may have to run "find" before that.

  22. Re:Not so sure. by HeckRuler · · Score: 3, Informative

    Dwarf Fortress did it first with diabolical machinations dreamt up by fell craftsdwarves whose infernal machines are powered by the blood of kittens. No, literally, THE BLOOD OF KITTENS. I've seen perpetual motion water wheels with blood as the medium and catsplosions are a common method of pest control. The founts of blood splattering into the throne room where the dark emperor sits and laughs are merely a side benefit. Using pressure plates to trigger floodgates leads to all sorts of possibilites. Dark horrible possibilities.

  23. Re:Reminded of a line from a movie... by HeckRuler · · Score: 2

    Linux runs on Dungeons & Dragons

    Hey, DM, can my time-traveling iron golem be running Linux?

    Do people not understand that traditional RPGs have an open format which allows you to do anything you can think of? Are people so stuck in their box that if it's not in the rulebook/list of buttons/daily powers that the action is impossible? This is the reason I play D&D in an age of ubiquitous computing and limitless processing. No amount of rules can cover the breadth of a human's imagination.

  24. Re:Slashdot is for fucking losers. by virgnarus · · Score: 2

    Since you're also posting, I guess that means it took one to know one, and my reply here at Slashdot does only to confirm the validity of my accusation.

  25. Solves a Fundamental Problem in CompSci by Jouster · · Score: 2

    It gets better! Because the behavior of the underlying hardware in a Turing machine is considered axiomatic and unfailing, the following M:tG CR sections:

    104.4b If a game that’s not using the limited range of influence option (including a two-player game) somehow enters a “loop” of mandatory actions, repeating a sequence of events with no way to stop, the game is a draw. Loops that contain an optional action don’t result in a draw.
    716.1b Occasionally the game gets into a state in which a set of actions could be repeated indefinitely (thus creating a “loop”). In that case, the shortcut rules can be used to determine how many times those actions are repeated without having to actually perform them, and how the loop is broken.
    716.3 Sometimes a loop can be fragmented, meaning that each player involved in the loop performs an independent action that results in the same game state being reached multiple times. If that happens, the active player (or, if the active player is not involved in the loop, the first player in turn order who is involved) must then make a different game choice so the loop does not continue.

    mean that this M:tG Turing machine solves the halting problem! The consequences of the fact that, without the halting problem, a Turing machine would never have been described are left as an exercise for the reader.