Thread

1. hnedeotes · 1790969271 · focus · HN ↗

   I think that what makes these games beatable repeatedly is that they&#x27;re static. Not saying an algorithm properly trained won&#x27;t play better than the average player a game like MtG, or my own <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aethersummon.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aethersummon.com (specially now while it has under 90 possible scrolls only) but if you have a regular release cadence (say weekly or bi-weekly) of relevant new &quot;cards&quot;, then I think the playing field is much more even for humans.

   Those new additions can invalidate the whole training data by a single new &quot;card&quot; that changes completely the dynamics and would be easy for a player to understand and incorporate but not for an algorithm (perhaps with enough compute to re-train it regularly it could) - that along with the decision trees being orders of magnitude deeper, wider and with more conditionalities than go, chess or stratego - even through the same turn with the same cards available and same table state - would probably pose much harder problems for a compute bound algo.

   1. qsort · 1790970847 · focus · HN ↗

      There are very few missing pieces for a game like MTG. The main reasons we don&#x27;t have a Stockfish for MTG is that it&#x27;s a PITA to implement the rules and that nobody cares (or at least not enough to make it happen.)

      There is nothing that, in principle, makes MTG different from poker or bridge, and we have superhuman engines for both.

      1. Marazan · 1790977945 · focus · HN ↗

         &gt; There is nothing that, in principle, makes MTG different from poker or bridge

         Only in the most general form they are games with cards and hidden information with a state space that some form of tree search can theoretically play out.

         The difference is the size of the search space. In MTG the search space is unimaginably huge. It would make Go&#x27;s search space look like a spec of hydrogen in the middle of the universe.

         It would require completely different techniques to produce a computer good at MtG than one that is good at bridge.

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