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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.
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.
This is exactly why we need a moral framework for AI development.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
-- 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.
I'm disappointed for entirely different reasons. I read, "An AI Learned Magic..." and thought, "Wow! What could that mean? Did it learn how illusionists perform their tricks? Are they claiming it somehow learned real magic? This should be interesting!"
And then I continued reading.
What I thought from the description is that a neural network was taught how to play Magic and somehow generated new cards by trying to play with them. Think for instance of a program that tries to come up with a new chess piece by coming up with a movement pattern, playing games with that piece and trying to figure out whether it'd be useful or interesting to play with.
This on the other hand looks like something like a markov chain generator. Amusing nonsense that can give humans fun ideas.
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.
No. It made nonsensical cards early into its learning process.
Later on it made cards like this:
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.
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.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
His next research project is to make an AI that defends against copyright infringement lawsuits.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Well it's a good start.
But...
There are no Angels in green. They are all white, black and maybe red.
Cards like this only work as part of the whole if the rest of the set takes cards like this into account. Otherwise it's all random and unbalanced.