I Built a COMPUTER in Magic: The Gathering

how could you possibly turn a boardgame into a computer well let's get technical [Music] Magic the Gathering is the original trading card game before pokemon and before you you demon possessing a little boy 25 years ago publisher Wizards of the coast created the modern trading card game craze and has since developed over 20,000 different cards for players to battle with inside of Magic the Gathering this stack would be over 10 metres tall by the way magic is famously complicated and complex but that complexity scientifically speaking has been hard to quantify until now because it turns out that magic is so complicated you can develop a computer inside of it yeah but with that upkeep out of the way it's time to draw you in to some science another Vizier drinks I don't need a vanilla 7 mana 6 6 that's ridiculous no first let's be very clear when I say you can make a computer with Magic the Gathering cards I don't mean you can make a monitor and keyboard and integrated circuits out of cardboard cards no I mean making a computer in the abstract sense making something that computes out of the real rules and interactions between real Magic the Gathering cards on a real table during a real game by the end of this episode you will see an actual game of Magic the Gathering operating like a simple computer and the simplest computer we can hope to build is something called a Turing machine an idealized and mathematical representation of computation invented by one Alan Turing in 1936 the formulation of the Turing machine was the birth of modern computer science when Turing was thinking about a machine that could take a list of instructions and enact them with some kind of logic it was all theoretical at first but you can physically build his basic idea it all starts with what Turing called a tape which could be just paper tape separated into cells those cells would have the information that our machine would work with this tape would extend off in both directions on our tape we have some symbols written on it and we have a head some part of the machine that can read write and change the symbols on that tape now imagine how this machine might work the head would move to a position on the tape and then according to some instruction some program that we gave our Turing machine that head would either do nothing or read the symbol and erase it or read the symbol erase it and replace it with a new symbol and then move along the tape in some direction a Turing machine can therefore read data write data and compute with that data according to some computer program that we feeded what we tell the head to do if it encounters one symbol or the other this seems like a very very simple setup and it is but it's extremely powerful a Turing machine can be constructed for any conceivable computer algorithm even one thought up by Nick visit and he's a dragon yes come on if a set of instructions and symbols can simulate a simple Turing machine it is therefore deemed Turing complete and something that is turn complete can do whatever a computer can do theoretically like math or store things in memory most of the programming languages you're familiar with like the one your device is running on right now our Turing complete which makes sense but you can find Turing completeness in some surprising places for example games like Minecraft infinite minesweeper and even Starcraft are complex enough that you can encode simple computers into them but it's not really a grand stretch of the imagination to imagine that a computer game can have a computer built inside of that computer game know what would be even more impressive is if an offline set of cardboard rectangles and their interactions between them could be considered Turing complete so let's build a Magic the Gathering computer thanks to Magic's extreme complexity there are real cards you can play in real situations you can find yourself in where you will no longer be playing a game of magic you'll be operating a Turing machine I got the deck that will do that right here but before I show you the weirdest game of Magic the Gathering you've ever seen I want to be very clear about something else too I did not personally come up with the Magic the Gathering Turing deck I am just going off of a paper called Magic the Gathering is turing-complete by dr. Alex Churchill and his colleagues they come up with this curious construction and they outlined the deck in full they wrote the paper I am just implementing the deck in neat space I have been communicating with dr. Churchill for literally months about making this deck and this Turing machine Magic the Gathering thing a reality because as you may suspect turning a bunch of cardboard cards into a computer literally is pretty complicated scoop good bet so following dr. Churchill's work I'm gonna show you how in a real game of Magic the Gathering we can implement a tape that a Turing machine can work with and a head that can read and write symbols according to a program that dr. Churchill and his colleagues were working with in that paper but if I'm gonna do all of this inside of a game of magic I'm gonna need an opponent which means I have to go from the void to the zone what's up everybody you are watching slash listening to the commands on podcast I'm your host Jimmy long how is it it's Josh Lee quiet guys I made a deck that's a computer what are you guys familiar with the concept of a Turing machine yeah you just talked about it for like three minutes oh yeah right well I have a real legacy legal tournament deck 60 cards that could in theory compute anything in a real game of Magic the Gathering and I want to play you know yeah we're down yeah all right what well grab 60 cards and meet me at the table what this table how does he keep getting in here I can fit through the doggie door Jimmy Josh this bad boy right here can in theory compute anything I contend but I need a really specific hand to get things going like I'm only running for lands and I need the perfect hand at seven so with that in mind let's give it a go okay let's go yeah and let's draw how good this hand is and scoop what sweet wonder man's own alright cool cool shuffle up shuffle up I'm gonna have it yeah no you wanna play best two out of four I'm gonna conceive and scoop scoop I am playing magic with you is fun Kyle whoa prepare to be computed leak why oh this is it's gonna be weird you got it when you go first I will play a forest okay pass the turn I will draw for the turn okay I will then play in ancient tomb okay mana to mana I'll tap ancient tomb for two and I will cast a grim monolith oh very good start no you got three mana veil will remain available and I will also cast two lotus petals okay that's a lot of mana fraternal one very specific mana because I will sack both lotus petals and I will play a power artifact on a grim monolith there you go infinite mana right because now you can tap an untapped Achra monolith as many times as you want what are you gonna do with all that mana into that I'll play gemstone array okay yes and I can change your man to any color you want yeah you have infinite all colors of Manovich I feel like I will now create infinite of each color of mana very nice the full rainbow okay well rain but I'm officially scared now and and then staff job there it is so now off the staff domination I will tap and untap drawing a card each time to draw the entirety of my deck into my hand this is where it gets a little complicated because this wasn't complicated yeah I now use a combination of right to lantern fathom feeder car liberated and capsized bouncing card back to my hand to exile Josh's library and hand so that during his turn there will be no actions he can take remember when he was just scooping a bunch that was fun to make this whole machine work I need my library to also be in a very specific order so now I'm gonna cast some cards that may seem a little bit weird at the moment now I cast more or less the rest of my deck maybe most importantly are the wrought loan REE animators and thes a thread necromancer's they are going to run our program by creating creatures of specific types and colors to fit onto the tape I'm now gonna cast a riptide replicator this is gonna be a way of exactly manipulating what is on our Turing tape so when riptide replicator comes into play obviously I need to choose a creature color and type and for that I need to refer to this very complicated program written by the researchers which determines exactly what each one of these a through necromancer's and the rot lung reanimates are going to trigger - for example if you want to a thorbourne or a basilisk or a cephalad or a demon or an elf or a giant or a harpy or fairy or what have you so I need to refer to this so what I'm gonna do is each time Riptide comes into play I'm gonna choose a different color and creature type and then I'm gonna capsize that back to my hand to choose another creature okay and power and toughness and type but I still need to perform 17 other steps in order to get the machine running for the full construction head over to youtube and look for my pin comment on this video otherwise just know that I use some cards you can see and some that you can't like prismatic lace glamour dye artificial evolution reality ripple cloak of invisibility stolen identity and donate to hack the cards to the colors and creatures I need to create phasing for another state of the machine to make extra creatures and enchantments and to give the tape and necessary permanence to judge I also cast illusory games to gain control of the 3/3 white fairy on the tape finally I use Karn to exile the rest of my hand I don't need all the permanence I don't want any more and itself with capsized I then cast wheel of Sun and Moon so that the cards I play can be cycled through forever as the Machine progresses and steely resolved naming assembly worker so that thanks to Aliyev ol Doran no creatures can be targeted okay so I know that was a lot of work and it was kind of crazy and these cards are interacting but it's very specific so okay for our Turing machine we have our tape of tokens here the power toughness indicates how far away from our Turing machine head we are what's doing there reading the writing they're replacing right now that's on r2 to ork the colors represent if it's to the left or to the right of the head if we did this correctly when I pass the turn to you every single action should be forced you're not going to lose the game because you're gonna skip your draw step I cannot target anything because of steely resolve every spell I cast is gonna go to the bottom of my library to be cast again my land doesn't untap because of choke creatures are not going to get destroyed by damage because of vigor and each one of these necromancer xandrie animators are going to create specific creature types and specific creature colors so we can add or subtract from the tape as the machine goes along what I want to do for you guys is demonstrate just one cycle of the Turing machine so if we can get this head our Turing machine head to be on a different creature and be in a different position either left or right you know you know three three or four four two two what have you if it's in a different position and it couldn't write a different symbol on our tape a different creature type then we will have moved like a Turing machine moves I'm ready okay I passed the turn all right before on tap yes hazing yes half of those that stuff fades out yeah the stuff you phased out will fade back in and the stuff that was in will phase out except for vigor and the tape itself yes don't have phasing oh and the blazing arc on any upkeep effects nope I don't besides that they didn't know then we go to our draw set but because of recycle we skip our drops phase we cannot attack nope there's not a single action we can take no there's no activated abilities there's nothing to tap that is that is it we passed the turn back so now I will move to my second term okay I only have one card in my hand which is the infest you might remember from earlier but because of the wild Eve occasion trigger and my upkeep I'm forced to cast the only card in my hand at random which is of course the infest and all creatures get - two - two until end of turn now the only creature that it's going to affect here on the tape is where a head is at around two - green org but remember exactly one of these cards cares about an orc die whenever an orc dies we're gonna make a white Pegasus and each one of these reanimate errs and zapper necromancer's just says some different version of different yeah it could be a combination of whenever a giant dies create a sliver or in when an assembly worker dies create a harpy a grandiy whatever it is whatever the program needs but this is how it's running so this is how you set up your punch card basically with rewriting each of these exactly I gain control of that white Pegasus that came into play under your control thanks to illusory gains infest resolves but because of we love Sun and Moon it goes on the bottom of my library instead of into my graveyard okay I now move to my draw face my draw card I have no mana I have nothing to do I cannot attack you have no action you can take and so I has the turn okay okay and then same thing happens for us as before where we have some phasing going on so phasing they switch and then wildly vocation will trigger but we don't have any cards enhanced with that doesn't matter can't draw a card because of recycle can't attack because of blazing Archon and then pass this turn back to you pal yes so I'm gonna move to my upkeep I only have one card in my hand the wild a vocation trigger goes off I cast a cleansing beam deals two damage to target creature in each other creature that shares a color with it now if you remember with the hacked Olivia we made everything an assembly worker which thanks to steely resolve cannot be targeted right except for the white Pegasus that just got created that just got created which is the new creature so now cleansing beam is going to do two damage to the white Pegasus and every other white creature so because of vigor all of your white creatures are going to get plus two plus two instead of having that - damage dealt to them right so none of them would die in there size matters yes nothing is dying to cleansing me okay so now cleansing beam is gonna go on the bottom my library because of wheel and Sun and Moon like the last turn I have nothing else to do so I cast that card no yep alright so stuff phases out or phases in depending on what it was yes same thing past the turn back you can't do anything alright so I move to my upkeep I only have one card in my hand wild a vocation I cast coalition victory which is you win the game if you control a land of each basic land type which I do and a creature of each color which I don't I control creatures of various colors but no loop but no blue so this results but I do not win and because we love Sun a moon I put it on the bottom again ok ok now you may be thinking why have a card like that inside of this deck well that could be like the way the computer halts if I were to win on that turn we could read the tape and see what it meant I see okay that tells you what it's the output yeah right for my draw step I draw a card and I cannot do anything else I pass the turn again alright I'm thing phasing phasing pass back all right so now we are on to the last phase of our Turing machine I have one card in hand I must cast it with wild a vocation it is soul snuffer's when it enters the battlefield put a minus 1 minus 1 counter on creature right so these can all basically just go down 1 right right instead of having two these can go down 1 and again there's other creatures here but we're concerned about the tape soul snuffer's is gonna put a minus 1 minus 1 counter on itself but because it's black and we have this dread of night it's going to die and go on the bottom of my library ok I move to my draw step now I'm back to infest which is exactly where we were just four turns ago and the same thing would happen but look at the tape so we started in a position where we had a two-two orc a green orc that's where our head was looking right right but now if we have paid attention to our minus one and plus one counters we are now at a two two green Kovu so if so everything shifted this so everything has shifted in one direction to the right to the Kabu our head is now looking at the calves ooh and where we started off where we've moved from instead of the orc that it was it is now a 4/4 fairy so you can kind of imagine if we replicate this cycle more and more we can move left or right along the tape and we've changed what the symbol was where we started right this was different so our program looked at the board state said if it's an orc make it a fairy and then it eventually moved down the tape in one direction with this balance of plus 1 and minus 1 counters okay so this tape is moving left and right and based on their program so are you saying like we could do a math problem yes even though the researchers themselves don't know exactly what the tape would have to look like not what the creatures would have to be or how long the tape would have to be Alex Churchill speculates that it could be hundreds of tape tokens so in theory you could set up a tape that eventually looks something like this let's say that we want to code in what two plus two equals so say we represent that by some ether born tokens on one side of the tape separated by some fairy tokens now again the researchers don't know exactly how it all run more research is needed but you could end up at the end of the game with the tape that looks something closer to this with four ather born next to each other on the tape and we would interpret that as four oh I'm certain since our next show so this magic game could do math in theory it could do any kind of math and I wanted to show you and all the magic nerds watching this today because as far as I know this is the first time anyone has ever seen magic the gathering or another tabletop game operating like a Turing machine in real life it's amazing Wow thank goodness Magic's been around for so many years to have all of those bizarro cards be able to do exactly what you need them to do great point yeah it's really really cool so do you win or what like in this game yeah yeah gonna happen like does it just keep going or oh I don't know I scoop wait after all that mom about the science boys it's not about the wins all right so guys more research is needed they'd have to test more board games but right now the researchers who came up with this construction have identified only Magic the Gathering as a turing-complete offline game which also makes magic mathematically speaking as complex as a game can possibly be and as complex to play well as a game can possibly be it's harder than chess mathematically and harder than go wolf it explains why I make so many mistakes when I play yeah and that deck you just saw in theory could have computed anything and it's tournament legal I could have gone to a tournament and and done that to somebody now please doubt what you guys think in the deck it's pretty amazing really interesting to see the inner workings of it at try and guess what was well it was trying to accomplish here's the thing in magic you know how we always miss triggers and stuff you can't miss triggers with that thing either well yeah otherwise two plus two is five yeah yeah throw it out the window I mean I love that you can bring it to a tournament it's legal I love that you can create this insane board state where you pass the turn and every time we just couldn't do anything yeah of all the interactions so yeah definitely a marvel to look at yeah it makes me love magic even more almost because you know across so many cards there's so many different interaction points and rules and all that stuff that you can effectively create a programming language yeah cardboard I think it's amazing yeah it's pretty nuts well thank you guys so much for lending me the vast resources of the command zone I love what you guys do hope to be on again soon but for now it's back to the void for me oh oh I'm just leave okay okay all right you still have like all of our die / it's fine and also this Oh would just giving you that all right well thanks for watching everyone I guess we'll see you next time bye [Music] I told you that was gonna be the weirdest game of magic you've ever seen huge thank you to the commands own boys Jimmy and Josh I watched their content and I listened to it every week you should too if you like Magic the Gathering especially commander huge thanks to Alex Churchill and his research and for helping me for months try to put this episode together trying to fully understand what was going on if you want to read the paper you can just google magic and turing-complete it's really fascinating especially if you're a big nerd like me and if anyone knows nerds it's me I know I've been playing magic for like 20 years [Music]

Channel: Because Science

Views: 1,844,998

Keywords: Nerdist, Because Science, Kyle Hill, Magic, Magic: the Gathering, Card Game, Trading Card Game, Strategy game, Wizards of the Coast, Spellslingers, Computer, Plainswalkers, Deckbuilding, computer science

Id: pdmODVYPDLA

Length: 22min 54sec (1374 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 31 2019