Prime Number Mystery Is Key to Magic: The Gathering Game Strategy

Summary

A game of Magic: The Gathering begins well before players lay down their first card. As a collectible card game, Magic requires competitive players to select the optimal deck of cards based on how they think it will function against hypothetical opponents with many different strategies—then the game itself offers proof or disproof of the player’s predictive powers. Because about 30,000 different cards are available today—though they’re likely not all owned by a single individual—there are many degrees of variation.This abundance of possibilities has sparked plenty of questions and ideas. Some players have wondered how complicated the game really is. For example, does it involve enough complexity to perform calculations, as you would with a computer? To this end, software engineer Alex Churchill and two other Magic players created a game situation in which the cards act as a universal computer—as a Turing machine. They posted their work to the preprint server arXiv.org in 2019.Their computer model sealed the deal: Magic is the most complex type of game, they concluded. Theoretically, any kind of calculation that a computer can perform, a particular Magic game can do the same. Ever since I learned this, the game has held a certain fascination for me.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.But in practice, of course, using a Magic deck for its calculating prowess is not particularly helpful. Coding such a Turing machine alone is extremely time-consuming. And who has the time to go one step further and go through the billions of different card combinations necessary to solve a math problem with Magic cards? The quicker option would be to type the problem into a computer through some elegant Python code (or another programming language).As it...