An AI Learned Magic: the Gathering, Now Creates Thousands of New Cards

merbs writes: Reed Milewicz, a computer science researcher, wowed a major online Magic: The Gathering forum when he posted the results of an experiment to "teach" a weak AI to auto-generate Magic cards. Milewicz had trained a deep, recurrent neural network—a kind of statistical machine learning model designed to emulate the neural networks of animal brains—to "learn" the text of every Magic card currently in existence. Then he had it generate thousands of its own.

He shared a number of the bizarre "cards" his program had come up with, replete with their properly fantastical names ("Shring the Artist," "Mided Hied Parira's Scepter") and freshly invented abilities ("fuseback"). Players devoured—and cheered—the results.

Comments

Re:No longer a game for "social rejects"?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-- C.S. Lewis

That is to say, yes. The opinion is changing as the kids who played pokemon and MTG grow up and continue to play, and the people who have apoplectic fits that these adults weren't swilling beer sitting in front of the tv 4 hours a day like "real adults" die off from heart attacks and strokes.

Re:A bit disappointed

[Anonymous Coward]

You severely underestimate just how much training goes in to a 2 year old's brain in order to identify trees. Not to mention the billions of years of the evolutionary equivalent to systems engineering that went in to the wetworks between his/her ears.

This guy spent a day dickering around with some existing programs and let it run overnight on ordinary computer and ended up with some interesting and quite non-trivial results.

Computers in any capacity have been around less than a century and they've come pretty far in what might as well be a single planck time interval on a biological evolutionary scale. If you're not impressed now, your children probably will be when they're your age now.