Related papers: Gaming is a hard job, but someone has to do it!

We classify the computational complexity of the popular video games Portal and Portal 2. We isolate individual mechanics of the game and prove NP-hardness, PSPACE-completeness, or (pseudo)polynomiality depending on the specific game…

In this thesis, we survey techniques and results from the study of Complexity Theory and Games. We then apply these techniques to obtain new results for previously unstudied games. Our contributions in the games Hexiom, Cut the Rope, and…

We analyze the computational complexity of several popular video games released for the Nintendo Game Boy video game console. We analyze the complexity of generalized versions of four popular Game Boy games: Donkey Kong, Wario Land, Harvest…

We prove NP-hardness results for five of Nintendo's largest video game franchises: Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Pokemon. Our results apply to generalized versions of Super Mario Bros. 1-3, The Lost Levels, and Super…

Tasks of different nature and difficulty levels are a part of people's lives. In this context, there is a scientific interest in the relationship between the difficulty of the task and the persistence need to accomplish it. Despite the…

Poset games have been the object of mathematical study for over a century, but little has been written on the computational complexity of determining important properties of these games. In this introduction we develop the fundamentals of…

Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…

With increasing game size, a problem of computational complexity arises. This is especially true in real world problems such as in social systems, where there is a significant population of players involved in the game, and the complexity…

We analyze some of the many game mechanics available to Link in the classic Legend of Zelda series of video games. In each case, we prove that the generalized game with that mechanic is polynomial, NP-complete, NP-hard and in PSPACE, or…

We analyze the computational complexity of the popular computer games Threes!, 1024!, 2048 and many of their variants. For most known versions expanded to an m x n board, we show that it is NP-hard to decide whether a given starting…

Speedrunning is a competition that emerged from communities of early video games such as Doom (1993). Speedrunners try to finish a game in minimal time. Provably verifying the authenticity of submitted speedruns is an open problem.…

We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…

We looked at a method for estimating the complexity measure of game tree size (the number of legal games). It seems effective for a number of children's games such as Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect Four and Othello.

Pebble games were extensively studied in the 1970s and 1980s in a number of different contexts. The last decade has seen a revival of interest in pebble games coming from the field of proof complexity. Pebbling has proven to be a useful…

Game difficulty is a crucial aspect of game design, that can be directly influenced by tweaking game mechanics. Perceived difficulty can however also be influenced by simply altering the graphics to something more threatening. Here, we…

We consider graphical games as introduced by Kearns et al. (2001). First we analyse the interaction of graphicality with a notion of strategic equivalence of games, providing a minimal complexity graphical description for games. Then we…

Game theory is the study of tractable games which may be used to model more complex systems. Board games, video games and sports, however, are intractable by design, so "ludological" theories about these games as complex phenomena should be…

We consider the complexity properties of modern puzzle games, Hexiom, Cut the Rope and Back to Bed. The complexity of games plays an important role in the type of experience they provide to players. Back to Bed is shown to be PSPACE-Hard…

Classify simple games into sixteen "types" in terms of the four conventional axioms: monotonicity, properness, strongness, and nonweakness. Further classify them into sixty-four classes in terms of finiteness (existence of a finite carrier)…

We build a general theory for characterizing the computational complexity of motion planning of robot(s) through a graph of "gadgets", where each gadget has its own state defining a set of allowed traversals which in turn modify the…