THE VIDEO SHELF · magic the gathering turing completeness
I Built a COMPUTER in Magic: The Gathering
Kyle Hill of Because Science explains and demonstrates, using real cards, how Magic: The Gathering can be used to build a Turing machine, a computer inside the card game.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN links it as the accessible, hands-on demo behind the claim that Magic is Turing complete.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Because Science
- Topic
- magic the gathering turing completeness
- Format
- demo
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 3
- HN mentions in dataset
- 4
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2019–2026
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
For anyone curious about the details of building a Turing machine in MtG, Because Science did a thorough breakdown and demonstration, using actual cards: [VIDEO]
lukifer on Hacker News · 2020-04
In Accidentally Turing-CompleteHere's a demo: [VIDEO] Didn't realize this before watching, but it's interesting that there's an incredibly complicated board state but the game state / actions are deterministic, e.g. the players don't have any choices about what to do once the machine is set up.
bentona on Hacker News · 2023-12
In Magic: The Gathering Is Turing Complete (2019)Someone made a video based on the paper, if you want to see the cards being used and a little more explanation: [VIDEO]
mckn1ght on Hacker News · 2026-06
In MTG Bench: Testing how well LLMs can play magic
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.