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:Now Creates Thousands of New Cards

[Sowelu]

Eh, play drafts in whatever the current standard set is. You'll run into a couple hundred cards maximum, all using the same few mechanics, and because everyone's trying to draft out of a very limited pool, you don't need universal knowledge...you just need to understand the game enough to build something with the pieces that are dropped in front of you. Plus it's cheaper and no asshole trick decks. Do it at the start of a block and there's a VERY small set of stuff to learn.

(sure it helps to be aware of what nasty tricks might be available, but it's really not that essential, and you can pick it up real fast)

As far as I'm concerned draft is the only fun way to play, haven't in a while now but still. Like ten bucks will get you a night of 5-10 games on the same level playing field as everyone else. Wizards' business model around draft games is to compete versus movies for friday night entertainment, and it's not really all that exploitative by comparison.

Disappointed Dipshits

[Tenebrousedge]

No one cares that you are not impressed, and no one cares about impressing you. Please don't bother posting this drivel.

Obviously this is not "real" intelligence. If and when that is developed, you can bet that it won't have anything to do with Magic cards. That you even expected that when reading this story means that you not only have no idea what AI research is all about, or much of an idea about programming in general, but also it speaks volumes about what your actual intelligence level is. Your maturity may also be called into question due to the content of your post.

You'd think with the level of tech expertise on here, you would have fewer people confusing the programming concept of AI with the science fiction concept of AI. If hard AI existed that's what the headline would be about. So far it does not; please refrain from polluting this forum with observations to that effect.