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Comment by staticautomatic | Hacker News Reader

Should we rule out the possibility that there are decks which are unbeatable when played well/"correctly"?

I think the probability is very small indeed. I've never met (or even heard about) a deck that you can't destroy with a matching counter. That's why the metagame is so important for higher level magic play.

Yes. Best case is that there are decks that are unbeatable when played correctly against other decks (even if that deck is played correctly). I can think of a few match ups that are likely "auto-lose" based on deck construction.

Most of the games AI has surpassed humans at have several things in common, and one of the biggest is they don't contain a great deal of hidden information. Chess is all in the open, with very set defined options. There are a ton of different game states, but none of them involve "what if my opponent suddenly drew the one card that I cannot in any way do anything about to prevent ruination".

TL;dr- robots will never defeat the "heart of the cards" unless you stack the game in their favor.

on this note there was a nice paper [0] proposing a game entirely focused on hidden information (Hanabi) as a benchmark for automated decisions.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.00506

There's hidden information, but also finite known quantities. The AI knows what tiles exist, have been played and haven't.

Unless you're allowing the AI to know the contents of the deck it's opposing in magic, you're probably making those decision trees impossibly complex. "Is countering this lightning bolt optimal or not" has a lot more meaning when you know what else is in the deck with the lightning bolt.

That is an interesting point, it is actually a strategy in the game to speculate on the opponent deck composition so it would make sense not to trivialize it here.

Of course, but how do you "fairly" account for that? You could teach the computer what the "meta" looks like, but players never reveal full deck contents to each other in tournament play.

Also, how does the AI select its deck? Does the player know going in what deck it will be playing? Part of the problem here is that you can build a weird, off meta deck for either the AI or player that can win a single game but what does that mean? Most decks are designed for a full tournament grind based on an expected range of decks to play against.

I guess you'd have to have the AI compete in a full tournament, but then the skill level of the individual players becomes a variable. IDK, it just seems like a really big hill to climb.

In theory if you had an unlimited amount of time and compute resources couldn't you just construct all possible decks and play them against each other, perhaps with some mix of naive and pre-trained strategies?

Yes. Got any extra "unlimited amount of time and computer resources" lying around?

I mean when we get to that level, couldn't we just use our unlimited time and resources to just create a model of the entire universe and just observe all the people playing the game and at all skill levels as well?

Imbalanced decks usually have their key pieces banned by WotC. As a result, in a sense, the game adapts to the players.

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