Related papers: Hardness of Modern Games
We establish some general schemes relating the computational complexity of a video game to the presence of certain common elements or mechanics, such as destroyable paths, collectible items, doors opened by keys or activated by buttons or…
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…
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.
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
Disability is an important factor affecting todays society. At the same time, more and more sub-healthy people are sick due to reduced body functions and cognitive functions. Exercise rehabilitation is a kind of physical therapy, which can…
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…
The twentieth century has seen the rise of a new type of video games targeted at a mass audience of "casual" gamers. Many of these games require the player to swap items in order to form matches of three and are collectively known as…
Amazons is a board game which combines elements of Chess and Go. It has become popular in recent years, and has served as a useful platform for both game-theoretic study and AI games research. Buro showed that simple Amazons endgames are…
We consider the $n\times n$ game of Phutball. It is shown that, given an arbitrary position of stones on the board, it is a PSPACE-hard problem to determine whether the specified player can win the game, regardless of the opponent's choices…
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…
The physics-based simulation game Angry Birds has been heavily researched by the AI community over the past five years, and has been the subject of a popular AI competition that is currently held annually as part of a leading AI conference.…
Hedonic games provide a natural model of coalition formation among self-interested agents. The associated problem of finding stable outcomes in such games has been extensively studied. In this paper, we identify simple conditions on…
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…
We study the complexity of problems related to subgame-perfect equilibria (SPEs) in infinite duration non zero-sum multiplayer games played on finite graphs with parity objectives. We present new complexity results that close gaps in the…
Numerous popular abstract strategy games ranging from Hex and Havannah to Lines of Action belong to the class of connection games. Still, very few complexity results on such games have been obtained since Hex was proved PSPACE-complete in…
We note that the remarkable EXPSPACE-hardness result in [G\"oller, Haase, Ouaknine, Worrell, ICALP 2010] ([GHOW10] for short) allows us to answer an open complexity question for simulation preorder of succinct one counter nets (i.e., one…
We prove that finding an epsilon-Nash equilibrium in a succinctly representable game with many players is PPAD-hard for constant epsilon. Our proof uses succinct games, i.e. games whose payoff function is represented by a circuit. Our…
We analyze the computational complexity of motion planning through local "input/output" gadgets with separate entrances and exits, and a subset of allowed traversals from entrances to exits, each of which changes the state of the gadget and…
Difficulty is one of the key drivers of player engagement and it is often one of the aspects that designers tweak most to optimise the player experience; operationalising it is, therefore, a crucial task for game development studios. A…
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…