Another week of working on the Pinball machine! Heres some (mostly visual) updates. Enjoy!

In the previous posts in this series we dug into some data analysis on Magic the Gathering cards and tried to model the mana cost of cards in order to answer questions like "how much does 'flying' cost?".

We found a linear model that could explain the costs to some degree, however it struggled to get right the more complex cost structure around eg. 0-mana or many-colered cards. In this post we make an attempt at a neural network model of MTG mana costs in order to address these nonlinearities.

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Source: freelancer200

Since pretty much the beginning of the Pinball project it was clear there is gonna be a Death Star featuring a critical weakness in the thermal exhaust as easy to hit as a womp rat. The overall idea would be that there is some kind of ramp and if you manage to shoot the ball up in the right state of the game (eg. when actually attacking the Death Star), this would give a huge number of points or something.

There should also be a hole where the ball can come out (obviously necessary), and another hole at the top (pretty much invisible to the player) where the ball can come in without destroying it (think: "thats no moon, thats a space station!").

This is the story (with lots of pictures) of the Pinball Death Star model we built (so far).