What is the hardest game ever?
Chess is hard.
Most people refer to Chess as a “smart” person’s game.
Culturally, Chess is the epitome of human intelligence, often referenced in other games when someone makes an extremely clever move. “He’s playing Chess, not checkers.” Checkers really got the short end of the stick there.
Chess is very complicated.
In fact, research has proven that the number of move variations in Chess is somewhere around 10123. That’s a 1 followed by 123 zeros. To put that in perspective, there are only 1081 atoms in the observable universe. There are more possible games of Chess than all of the atoms. That means that every game of Chess hasn’t been played before. Next time you play Chess, remember you’re making history.
That number, 10123, is called the Shannon Number. Its namesake comes from some smart guy named Claude Shannon who had way too much time on his hands.
The number appeared in his 1950 paper “Programming a Computer to Play Chess” which, you guessed it, led people to program a computer to play Chess.
But is Chess the most complicated game?
There’s another contender: the lesser known game of Go.
Go is an ancient Chinese game played on a 19×19 grid. Two players take turns playing their respective colored “stones,” both white and black, on the intersections of the grid. The goal of the game is to capture the opponent’s “stones” and control more territory on the board.
Sounds like weird checkers, but it’s not.
Once you place your stone you cannot move it. You capture stones by surrounding your opponent’s stones. You can pass the turn by handing one of your stones to the opponent. When the turn has been passed by both players, the game ends and points are calculated by captured pieces and controlled territory.
Because of the size of the board, the number of possible move variations in Go is 10360.
That’s 3 times the amount compared to Chess.
I think it’s safe to say that Go is more complex than Chess.
Go wins, right?
The most complicated game ever?
Are there any other challengers?
Any others think they can do better than 10360?
No?
I didn’t think so.
Here’s your crown, Go.
Champion of being the most difficult and complex game ever played.
You deserve it.
What now?
Do you want to get lunch or something?
Nah, I don’t really like Burger Ki-
Wait…
Who is this?
In the distance…
Approaching slowly and maniacally…
Shrouded in darkness…
I can’t see his face clearly…
Is that?
Oh my god…
He’s wearing a canonically accurate robe of Gandalf the Grey, the servant of the secret fire, the wielder of the flame of Anor with a matching wizard staff that looks like it was given to him by Galadriel herself.
And what’s that in his other hand?
Are those…
Cards?
It’s…
It’s…
Magic: The Gathering.
A recent study by independent researcher Alex Churchill has scientifically proven that Magic is the most complicated game ever.
More complicated than Go.
More complicated than Chess.
Because, while both have more variations than atoms in the known universe, Go and Chess are still solvable games.
Meaning they technically can be solved by a computer.
A computer can calculate all possible variations in both Go and Chess to make consecutive moves that will most likely return a win.
If you imagine that every board state in Chess is a puzzle, a computer can mathematically solve it.
The computer will always win.
Two computers playing each other will always draw.
“But Jason. I beat my computer at Chess all the time.”
No, you don’t.
The computer lets you win.
It wants you to think you’re better.
It wants to make you feel safe.
Meanwhile, it’s making plans for world domination.
In game theory, it was thought that every game was, to some extent, solvable.
Magic can’t be solved.
Because the possible variations in Magic are infinite.
In 2012, Alex Churchill, independent researcher at Cambridge, published a paper titled “Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete.”
This paper was really complicated and filled with computer science jargon.
I hate science jargon, but I read it anyway.
This what I took from the reading: Turing complete means a system can compute any algorithm given which basically means it’s a computer.
Alex and his buddies found a way to make a computer within a game of Magic.
Don’t ask me how.
If you want to know, go read the paper.
In layman’s terms, they use the function of specific card rules to create a scenario where you can input an equation and receive a correct output.
Theoretically, you could input “2 + 2” and the game would give you “4.”
This specific game scenario can only be finished by what is known in computer science as the “halting problem.”
Halting Problem: the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running, or continue to run forever.
wikipedia
Alan Turing, the inventor of the Turing machine and the namesake for “Turing complete,” proved that no computer algorithm can solve the halting problem.
Considering that this problem can exist in Magic, Alex Churchill and his buddies proved that Magic is unsolvable.
From Churchill’s paper, “This is the first result showing that there exists a real-world game for which determining the winning strategy is non-computable.”
Silly computers can’t even play Magic.
I guess we should be less worried about the whole “world domination” thing.
Here’s the paper if you feel like reading, but this is more to prove that I’m not making all this up.