Related papers: Classic Nintendo Games are (Computationally) Hard

Successful and accurate modelling of level difficulty is a fundamental component of the operationalisation of player experience as difficulty is one of the most important and commonly used signals for content design and adaptation. In games…

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…

The main result of this paper is that computing the value of a one-clock priced timed game (OCPTG) is PSPACE-hard. Along the way, we provide a family of OCPTGs that have an exponential number of event points. Both results hold even in very…

Kill-all Go is a variant of Go in which Black tries to capture all white stones, while White tries to survive. We consider computational complexity of Kill-all Go with two rulesets, Chinese rules and Japanese rules. We prove that: (i)…

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)…

Without further ado, we present the P_3-game. The P_3-game is decidable for elementary classes of graphs such as paths and cycles. From an algorithmic point of view, the connected P_3-game is fascinating. We show that the connected P_3-game…

The rank of a bimatrix game (A,B) is defined as rank(A+B). Computing a Nash equilibrium (NE) of a rank-$0$, i.e., zero-sum game is equivalent to linear programming (von Neumann'28, Dantzig'51). In 2005, Kannan and Theobald gave an FPTAS for…

In this paper, we show that the problem of determining whether one player can force a win in a multiplayer version of the children's card game War is PSPACE-hard. The same reduction shows that a related problem, asking whether a player can…

Many puzzle video games, like Sokoban, involve moving some agent in a maze. The reachable locations are usually apparent for a human player, and the difficulty of the game is mainly related to performing actions on objects, such as pushing…

Consider QBF, the Quantified Boolean Formula problem, as a combinatorial game ruleset. The problem is rephrased as determining the winner of the game where two opposing players take turns assigning values to boolean variables. In this…

Parity games are two player games with omega-winning conditions, played on finite graphs. Such games play an important role in verification, satisfiability and synthesis. It is therefore important to identify algorithms that can efficiently…

We show that for any eps>0 the problem of finding a factor (2-eps) approximation to the entangled value of a three-player XOR game is NP-hard. Equivalently, the problem of approximating the largest possible quantum violation of a tripartite…

Combinations of Monte-Carlo tree search and Deep Neural Networks, trained through self-play, have produced state-of-the-art results for automated game-playing in many board games. The training and search algorithms are not game-specific,…

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved many recent successes, but our understanding of its strengths and limitations is hampered by the lack of rich environments in which we can fully characterize optimal behavior, and correspondingly…

Collectible card games are challenging, widely played games that have received increasing attention from the AI research community in recent years. Despite important breakthroughs, the field still poses many unresolved challenges. This work…

Wordle is a single-player word-guessing game where the goal is to discover a secret word $w$ that has been chosen from a dictionary $D$. In order to discover $w$, the player can make at most $\ell$ guesses, which must also be words from…

We present a new game, Dots & Polygons, played on a planar point set. Players take turns connecting two points, and when a player closes a (simple) polygon, the player scores its area. We show that deciding whether the game can be won from…

Fortification-interdiction games are tri-level adversarial games where two opponents act in succession to protect, disrupt and simply use an infrastructure for a specific purpose. Many such games have been formulated and tackled in the…

We analyze the computational complexity of solving the three "temporal rift" puzzles in the recent popular video game Final Fantasy XIII-2. We show that the Tile Trial puzzle is NP-hard and we provide an efficient algorithm for solving the…

This paper investigates repeated win-lose coordination games (WLC-games). We analyse which protocols are optimal for these games covering both the worst case and average case scenarios, i,e., optimizing the guaranteed and expected…