6 thoughts on “I’m a Melvin

  1. You know, I’m pretty darned good with the rules, but I won’t consider myself a guru until I memorize the layers. :)

  2. Have they formalized the rules enough that there’s a program that is a perfect magic judge?

  3. Magic: the Gathering Online does a very impressive job, and gets the vast majority of interactions that are likely to happen in a real game, but it does have occasional bugs (and crashes). It also doesn’t support all of the older cards.

    And yes, the rules are very precise, and are probably computable, but it’s quite possible that they’re intractable (particularly in the cases where you need to detect unbounded loops and cycles, that may possibly span players’ turns). Magic Online simply doesn’t do the defining of macros that paper Magic basically requires.

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