Related papers: Hardness of Modern Games
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 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 paper, we give simple NP-hardness reductions for three popular video games. The first is Baba Is You, an award winning 2D block puzzle game with the key premise being the ability to rewrite the rules of the game. The second is Fez,…
We study the computational complexity of distance games, a class of combinatorial games played on graphs. A move consists of colouring an uncoloured vertex subject to it not being at certain distances determined by two sets, D and S. D is…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
We study the problem of deciding the winner of reachability switching games for zero-, one-, and two-player variants. Switching games provide a deterministic analogue of stochastic games. We show that the zero-player case is NL-hard, the…
Avoidance games are games in which two players claim vertices of a hypergraph and try to avoid some structures. These games are studied since the introduction of the game of SIM in 1968, but only few complexity results are known on them. In…
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…
In this paper, we study three connection games among the most widely played: Havannah, Twixt, and Slither. We show that determining the outcome of an arbitrary input position is PSPACE-complete in all three cases. Our reductions are based…
Recently, due to the widespread diffusion of smart-phones, mobile puzzle games have experienced a huge increase in their popularity. A successful puzzle has to be both captivating and challenging, and it has been suggested that this…
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 analyze the computational complexity of two 2-player games involving packing objects into a box. In the first game, players alternate drawing polycubes from a shared pile and placing them into an initially empty box in any available…
We prove PSPACE-hardness for fifteen games in the Super Mario Bros. 2D platforming video game series. Previously, only the original Super Mario Bros. was known to be PSPACE-hard (FUN 2016), though several of the games we study were known to…
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 study the computational complexity of an important property of simple, regular and weighted games, which is decisiveness. We show that this concept can naturally be represented in the context of hypergraph theory, and that decisiveness…
We study algorithmic complexity of solving subtraction games in a~fixed dimension with a finite difference set. We prove that there exists a game in this class such that any algorithm solving the game runs in exponential time. Also we prove…