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Magic: the Gathering Is Turing Complete

Posted by Soulskill on from the nerd-crossover dept.

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."

12 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.

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    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 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
  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?

  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. Clarke was right by kav2k · · Score: 5, Funny

    Any sufficiently advanced technologyis indistinguishable from Magic.