Related papers: Classic Nintendo Games are (Computationally) Hard

In a case study spanning four classic Super Mario games and the analysis of 237 known glitches within them, we classify a variety of weaknesses that are exploited by speedrunners to enable them to beat games quickly and in surprising ways.…

The UNIQUE GAMES problem is a central problem in algorithms and complexity theory. Given an instance of UNIQUE GAMES, the STRONG UNIQUE GAMES problem asks to find the largest subset of vertices, such that the UNIQUE GAMES instance induced…

Many popular puzzle and matching games have been analyzed through the lens of computational complexity. Prominent examples include Sudoku, Candy Crush, and Flood-It. A common theme among these widely played games is that their generalized…

Dull, weak and nested solitaire games are important classes of parity games, capturing, among others, alternation-free mu-calculus and ECTL* model checking problems. These classes can be solved in polynomial time using dedicated algorithms.…

We review NP-hardness framework and PSPACE-hardness framework for a type of 2D platform games. We introduce a EXPTIME-hardness framework by defining some new gadgets. We use these hardness frameworks to analyse computational complexity of…

Pok\'emon Red, a classic Game Boy JRPG, presents significant challenges as a testbed for agents, including multi-tasking, long horizons of tens of thousands of steps, hard exploration, and a vast array of potential policies. We introduce a…

We study the complexity of a particular class of board games, which we call `slide and merge' games. Namely, we consider 2048 and Threes, which are among the most popular games of their type. In both games, the player is required to slide…

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.

This paper proves that push-pull block puzzles in 3D are PSPACE-complete to solve, and push-pull block puzzles in 2D with thin walls are NP-hard to solve, settling an open question by Zubaran and Ritt. Push-pull block puzzles are a type of…

This project investigates the potential of computers to solve complex tasks such as games. The paper proves that the complexity of a generalized version of spider solitaire is NP-Complete and uses much of structure of the proof that…

Using the notion of visibility representations, our paper establishes a new property of instances of the Nondeterministic Constraint Logic (NCL) problem (a PSPACE-complete problem that is very convenient to prove the PSPACE-hardness of…

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 establish the first hardness results for the problem of computing the value of one-round games played by a verifier and a team of provers who can share quantum entanglement. In particular, we show that it is NP-hard to approximate within…

The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper's readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times…

We are going to show that some variants of a puzzle called Pull in which the boxes have handles (i.e. we can only pull the boxes in certain directions) are NP-hard

Complex games have long been an important benchmark for testing the progress of artificial intelligence algorithms. AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and MuZero have defeated top human players in Go and Chess, garnering widespread societal attention…

We prove NP-hardness and #P-hardness of Tetris clearing (clearing an initial board using a given sequence of pieces) with the Super Rotation System (SRS), even when the pieces are limited to any two of the seven Tetris piece types. This…

We investigate the complexity of the platform video game Celeste. We prove that navigating Celeste is PSPACE-hard in five different ways, corresponding to different subsets of the game mechanics. In particular, we prove the game PSPACE-hard…

Many of the famous single-player games, commonly called puzzles, can be shown to be NP-Complete. Indeed, this class of complexity contains hundreds of puzzles, since people particularly appreciate completing an intractable puzzle, such as…

In this paper, we study the average case complexity of the Unique Games problem. We propose a natural semi-random model, in which a unique game instance is generated in several steps. First an adversary selects a completely satisfiable…