On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, Alan Olsen wrote:
You could do a collectable card game based on the patent mess, but the idea of a collectable card game has already been patented. (Now owned by Hasbro now that they bought Wizards of the Cost.)
Wait, there are non-Hasbro collectable card games, aren't there? Do they all simply license from Hasbro? In any case, simple collectible cards would be all right to start with. So what if they "happen" to fall into patterns. They're algorithms! "I'll trade you a Floyd-Warshall for a Rabin-Miller, but only if you throw in a Nisan-Wigderson Derandomizing Pseudorandom Generator...I'm low on randomness." Instead of Mana, have "time," "space," "randomness," and other complexity measures. (Death to the first person who suggests "ink.") Trade off between the two as appropriate. Special cards ("Blum Speedup Theorem") affect resource consumption. Maybe offer other cards which give benefits at a cost ("Superstitious Mathematician" - halves time required to run algorithms, but doesn't believe in randomness so you lose all randomness counters...) -David