Programming Project

[herbig]

Greetings everyone. I am required to do something major related for my Honors thesis and would like ideas for a Magic related software project. It could be anything really but I would like to look into making something that might benefit the Magic community. Programs like Apprentice or Workstation are out since they've already been done and there is no need to improve on those. But, if you have any novel ideas either post them here or PM me.

[warble]

Hook up the MWS card picture catalog with some visual recognition software so that you can play with your real deck.  Then, to play online, you just set up your webcam and turn it on, start your program to accept the live feed, and use some easily downloadable connection components to connect two computers to play.  The program should easily place the cards recognized on the playing field, but the interface does not need to immediately support MWS.

To do this, I would begin by downloading with MWS pictures archive, download some visual recognition software, hook up your webcam, and try to get that working.  Once you can recognize the pictures you will want to setup a layout to display a digital representation of the playing field.  You can either do this live or with a triggered event (which would be easier).  Don't sample every picture, pick a rate your computer can hang with.  Finally, the connection component will come into play as you want to actually enable network play with your program.  Don't immediately support everything, work on getting your platform and one you have it and people see benefit it'll be expanded, made widely compatible, and maybe if you are lucky integrated into MWS.

If this seems a bit too large-scale, you could try integrating voice into MWS so that you can hear the beautiful 12-year-old voice of your opponent.  Again, start with a prototype and get that working first.  The biggest mistake you'll make is going halfway down the wrong road and having to scrap all that hard work.  Been there, done that, prototype every new project or you screw yourself.  Voice should be uber-easy as that software is already present for most games and you may even find an API.  Again, it's easy to see how this project can be broadened to actually provide an API and interface into MWS for actual play.  But then again, every good idea has a humble beginning.

Just one of my billions of programming projects I have no time for.  If you need guidance on any of that just pop me a PM I have experience with everything except the network connectivity (because I ain't got tha' time, being a sellout and all, to do much aside from make mad cashes from the rich people).

[Harlequin]

I think it would be interesting to study the "randomness" of the shuffling script within MWS.  There are several ways of "randomizing" a permutaion (ie: a stack of 60 unique cards, drawn X at a time without replacement).  Clearly the only way to truely randomize a deck is with a combination of riffle shuffling and "pool" shuffling (where you lay out all the cards and mix them around like they do for the poker games at the casino), and computers only generate "psudorandom" numbers, based on an algorythm seeded generally by the system clock.  Ooo you could even try one of those USB true randomizion devices, the ones that use electronic static to generate randomness. 
you'd definately want to brush up on your Time Serise Analysis (with auto-corrilated time variance).

At any rate, you always here ppl complaneing about the quality of the shuffler in MWS and App. 

You could also include a "sample hand" generator and some code for "mulligan" logic so you could use the more accurate shuffler to evalute your mulligan hands out of say 10,000 randonly generated hands.
This is technically in MWS but because no one trusts the shuffler it is almost irrelivant.

[Methuselahn]

It would be nice to have something that could tabulate tournament data automatically.  Perhaps TOs could input the 8 lists and feed the information to a server.  The server would then store relevant data (# of cards, decklists, etc.) and the software could let you analyze it how ever you wished.  Just a thought.