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Magic: The Gathering is Officially The Most Complex Game in The World


Wizards of the Coast

A team of game theory researchers has conducted a new study that officially identified Magic: The Gathering as the world's most complex real-world game

During an interview with Technology Review, independent researcher and board game designer Alex Churchill said that Magic: The Gathering is the world's most complex game. From a complexity point of view, most real-world games are trivial, meaning they have finite limits on their complexity, such as the size of a game board or a restricted number of moves available to the player. There are only a few real-world games are considered to have what they call "non-trivial complexity". "Most research in algorithmic game theory of real-world games has primarily looked at generalisations of commonly played games rather than the real-world versions of the games," Churchill and co. said.

After running simulations intended to determine the outcome of a Magic: The Gathering game, Churchill's team found that the game is non-computable. "This is the first result showing that there exists a real-world game for which determining the winning strategy is non-computable," Churchill and co. said. "Magic: The Gathering does not fit assumptions commonly made by computer scientists while modeling games."

All other real-world games have models that reveal the winning strategy can be computed in a Turing test but according to the study, Magic is "non-computable", making it a unique outlier and the most complicated game in the world.

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