Links for June 2019
1 June 2019Theorem 1: Determining the outcome of a game of Magic: The Gathering in which all remaining moves are forced is undecidable.
An example 60-card deck that is capable of executing this construction on the first turn of the game and which is legal in the competitive Legacy format can be seen in Table III.
Yet another fun Turing-completeness proof; the undecidability is of course via a reduction to the Halting Problem.
Since apparently these links posts are just ‘Things that shouldn’t be TC but are’, another Turing-complete game is Baba is You (which I haven’t played yet, but all reviews indicate that it is very good).
Things aren’t as bad as you think (at least in the UK).
Relatedly(?), an Essex man has set the record for the land speed record in a tuk-tuk.
The Voynich manuscript has (once again) allegedly been deciphered, although it seems unlikely to be correct. Ars Technica and Language Log analyse this most recent attempt.
The Persistence of Chaos is an art piece consisting of an airgapped 2008 laptop ‘running 6 pieces of malware that have caused financial damages totaling $95B’. It was auctioned off for $1.345M.
This YouTube channel uploads videos of dogs being groomed and it is the most relaxing thing I have found in the last few years.