[Sweepi]

"I was totally surprised by this, because it means that a (mostly) fully-functioning bot capable of playing arbitrary games of Magic: The Gathering has a small enough footprint to run locally on your machine"

I dont get that. Maybe I am missing something.

Lets say, the MTG AI was so intensive to run that it would be unreasonable to run on the customer's machine - then I wouldn't run it on the server either, since it would be quite expensive (and bot games in card games are usually not pay per play).

Also, servers are not magic - most of them run on the same x86 CPUs as the local machine, with a lower clockspeed than their desktop counter parts (but higher than (most) notebooks). Therefore, the only way to archive a lower Bot turn timer compared to running locally would be to use significantly more cores than the customer (usually 4-8, hence 8-16 allocated cores per player?!). Sounds like a nightmare, especially during peak concurrent player hours/days!

If the CPU Player does not support multi-core, running locally should be faster in any case.

[Ensorceled]

>> "I was totally surprised by this, because it means that a (mostly) fully-functioning bot capable of playing arbitrary games of Magic: The Gathering has a small enough footprint to run locally on your machine"

> I dont get that. Maybe I am missing something. Lets say, the MTG AI was so intensive to run that it would be unreasonable to run on the customer's machine - then I wouldn't run it on the server either [...]

They said "footprint", not "processing power". The bot's rules engine is small enough to run in the memory footprint on older iPhone or Android devices, a server could have a lot of memory dedicated to holding a state machine or rules engine and still use very little processing power to execute the engine for any particular request.

[themoonisachees]

Fair enough for desktop, but also remember that MTGA runs on phones.

[lima]

MTG is a very complicated game with a complex ruleset.

[apetresc]

His point wasn't that an MTG bot should be easy to run, his point was that it shouldn't be any easier/cheaper to run server-side than client-side.

But to address your point, while that is true, Sparky itself plays with very basic decks, and plays even those very poorly. The goal of Sparky is to introduce players to the rules, not to be a competitive MtG agent; playing badly is intended. I wouldn't be surprised if Sparky's code is actually just a bunch of very simple heuristics (maximize your mana utilization this turn, attack with any creature that can trade evenly or better, etc).