There's actually already something kinda like that. The only part of the corpus that needs more encoding is the rules text (since you can't compress colour, cost, type, p/t, any more than what it is now) and I'm working on figuring out a 'programmatic' representation of it which would be useful for training, but also for other search-related things.
The rules text conversion is the part I find most interesting. I'm imagining something that would define "destroy target creature" as "permanent(creature) move(battlefield, graveyard)", and "target player draws a card" to be "card move(library[top], hand)" In this way, the network could see that certain game actions have meaning. For example moving a card to the battlefield (elvish piper) is associated with higher mana costs than moving a card from library to graveyard (mill), therefore when crafting an effect, it will be more likely to cost it correctly.
Obviously I haven't gone deeply into this yet, but I can see it working. Cards would be data arrays with fields like P/T, Loyalty, rules text. They could have local instances that handle values like owner, controller, tapped status. For the system to understand complex mana issues, more work is needed. Mana would need a structure for costs, to handle hybrid, phyrexian and the like. A separate structure for generation would handle things like coming from a snow source, only only being able to be used to pay for artifacts, and so on.
Since each point of mana has all sorts of knobs and dials, it's pretty much required that each be treated like a separate object, more akin to a token than an anonymous component of the value "Four red".
The rules text conversion is the part I find most interesting. I'm imagining something that would define "destroy target creature" as "permanent(creature) move(battlefield, graveyard)", and "target player draws a card" to be "card move(library[top], hand)" In this way, the network could see that certain game actions have meaning. For example moving a card to the battlefield (elvish piper) is associated with higher mana costs than moving a card from library to graveyard (mill), therefore when crafting an effect, it will be more likely to cost it correctly.
Obviously I haven't gone deeply into this yet, but I can see it working. Cards would be data arrays with fields like P/T, Loyalty, rules text. They could have local instances that handle values like owner, controller, tapped status. For the system to understand complex mana issues, more work is needed. Mana would need a structure for costs, to handle hybrid, phyrexian and the like. A separate structure for generation would handle things like coming from a snow source, only only being able to be used to pay for artifacts, and so on.
Since each point of mana has all sorts of knobs and dials, it's pretty much required that each be treated like a separate object, more akin to a token than an anonymous component of the value "Four red".
I still dream of reducing Magicese to a small vocabulary of instructions, translating the corpus, and training a net on that.
I may pick that up as a project, now that I know I can do training myself.
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