Related papers: PSPACE-Hard 2D Super Mario Games: Thirteen Doors

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…

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…

We prove that a variant of 2048, a popular online puzzle game, is PSPACE-Complete. Our hardness result holds for a version of the problem where the player has oracle access to the computer player's moves. Specifically, we show that for an…

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 prove computational intractability of variants of checkers: (1) deciding whether there is a move that forces the other player to win in one move is NP-complete; (2) checkers where players must always be able to jump on their turn is…

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.…

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…

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…

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 show that the Minesweeper game is PP-hard, when the object is to locate all mines with the highest probability. When the probability of locating all mines may be infinitesimal, the Minesweeper game is even PSPACE-complete. In our…

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…

There has been a recent explosion in the capabilities of game-playing artificial intelligence. Many classes of RL tasks, from Atari games to motor control to board games, are now solvable by fairly generic algorithms, based on deep…

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…

Fire Emblem (FE) is a popular turn-based tactical role-playing game (TRPG) series on the Nintendo gaming consoles. This paper studies the computational complexity of a simplified version of FE (only floor tiles and wall tiles, the HP and…

We prove PSPACE-completeness of two classic types of Chess problems when generalized to n-by-n boards. A "retrograde" problem asks whether it is possible for a position to be reached from a natural starting position, i.e., whether the…

We consider the pebble game on DAGs with bounded fan-in introduced in [Paterson and Hewitt '70] and the reversible version of this game in [Bennett '89], and study the question of how hard it is to decide exactly or approximately the number…

We prove that a particular pushing-blocks puzzle is intractable in 2D, improving an earlier result that established intractability in 3D [OS99]. The puzzle, inspired by the game *PushPush*, consists of unit square blocks on an integer…

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…

We study the computational complexity of the Buttons \& Scissors game and obtain sharp thresholds with respect to several parameters. Specifically we show that the game is NP-complete for $C = 2$ colors but polytime solvable for $C = 1$.…

We analyze affine reachability problems in dimensions 1 and 2. We show that the reachability problem for 1-register machines over the integers with affine updates is PSPACE-hard, hence PSPACE-complete, strengthening a result by Finkel et…