The AI That Learned Magic (the Gathering)

Magic the Gathering is a complex, nerdtastic phenomenon; it's part Lord of the Rings, part chess. In simpler, better times, when I was just a wide-eyed kid with a black deck, the fantasy card game was fairly simple, and mostly casual--not yet the 250 million-a-year industry it is today. In 2015, the game is both big business and a full-blown subculture, home to a huge community of casual players, a competitive pro circuit, and now, its very own artificial intelligence--one that generates thousands of brand new cards by mining the data of the old. Reed Morgan Milewicz, a programmer and computer science researcher, may be the first person to teach an AI to do Magic, literally. Milewicz wowed a popular online MTG forum--as well as hacker forums like Y Combinator's Hacker News and Reddit--when he posted the results of an experiment to "teach" a weak AI to auto-generate Magic cards.