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Comment by logfromblammo | Hacker News Reader

So add a new rule:

Choice-lock. If any player is unable to make a choice for some finite countable number of consecutive turns, they lose.

This could have also prevented combining infinite turn combos with the ante-related cards to produce "I have created a game state where I can take ownership all the cards in your deck, and then win," which was fun to do in the original M:tG PC game, even though running through the combo to actually take all of the cards was a bit tedious.

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This almost certainly doesn't prevent turing completeness.

You'd just need to add additional construction that every N turns gives each player a choice but where that choice does not affect the behavior of the machine.

Now, if only we had algorithm to decide whether for provided game table state, the chain of triggers ever stops or continues indefinitely.

It stops at the Nth instruction, where N is determined by some game designer to be long enough to create interesting combos, but not so long that one player can force the other to be their CPU indefinitely.

This seems like a bizarre rule to add. Why is this result even a bad thing for Magic?

It makes it more difficult to create challenging-but-still-fair bots in computerized versions of the game.

But that's already how bots are made. You don't need to add rules to the game before you can constrict the thinking time of entertainment AI

Challenging but fair bots are by definition not supposed to treat the game as totally algorithmically solvable. They can work fine on heuristics rather than algorithms, the same way that players do. There are moments when a player needs to think through all the possibilities available in the game state, and other moments when they just use a rule of thumb, like, "use this card to destroy the greatest threat currently out because time is not currently on my side to wait for what they might play next".

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