Comment by tstrimple
2 years ago
I'd argue that humans are actually pretty fucking good at this. After all, it's humans who are exploiting the weaknesses WOTC build into the game via new card releases. Balance testing is a numbers game though. If you test your software you can be reasonably confident if you release it to 10 people, it'll perform pretty much as expected. If that software is installed by millions of people, you're going to start experiencing every edge case that can only occur in extremely rare circumstances.
Or another example, the software released to ten customers can be insecure with little repercussions. But insecure software released to millions is going to be zero-day'd in no time. The MTG community absolutely has hackers that are just waiting for the latest vulnerability to be released.
The latest set released by WOTC this week has an infinite mana loop that you can get on turn four. I don't think this stuff will ever stop, and I honestly hope it doesn't. Bans / restrictions can mitigate the damage to certain formats, and it really stirs up the creativity of folks in the meantime.
This seems like a question of linguistic semantics, but I'd argue that groups of humans are only good at this at the scale where its not so much a skill of the individual humans but a property of the larger system itself. Millions of humans individually trying to figure out how to exploit some new cards aren't going to be anywhere close to as good as millions of people playing games against each other to try things out, and at that point, it's not obvious to me that humans even scale as well compared to what might be possible with a computer program.
While this is true to some extent, there are absolutely known "hackers" within the community that are particularly good at finding these sorts of interactions. The millions will shake out the rest though for sure.
Yeah, there obviously are some people who are outliers in this regard, but I don't think that's an argument that humans in general are good at this. There are people who can perform complex arithmetic in their head or even eat airplanes one piece at a time[1], but overall I'd still classify humans as "not great" at those tasks.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito