Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete

I guess this is newsworthy because a paper was put on arXiv, but the result has been known for a while. See e.g. this submission a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15712377

Here's a deck list in case you're curious. https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/3933484#paper I was considering picking it up when it was around $1k but now that it's over $3k there's no way. If I did the math right, the odds of hitting the opening hand you want is 0.00004%. Give or take a mulligan and maybe being able to get the combo off on turn two or three I think that's high enough odds that one could conceivably eventually succeed (assuming they can…

A note on this submission: This paper differs from previous "Magic is Turing-complete" links you may have seen here in that this construction embeds a universal Turing machine that runs without requiring the players to make particular choices. Note that the previous "Magic is Turing-complete" links you may have seen here were presumably pointing to the earlier constructions by Alex Churchill, which, as mentioned, required the players to make particular choices. Well, in this paper, Churchill (along with Biderman…

(2019) Discussion at that time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19847939