Related papers: You Can't Solve These Super Mario Bros. Levels: Un…

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 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…

The procedural generation of levels and content in video games is a challenging AI problem. Often such generation relies on an intelligent way of evaluating the content being generated so that constraints are satisfied and/or objectives…

We present an approach to generate novel computer game levels that blend different game concepts in an unsupervised fashion. Our primary contribution is an analogical reasoning process to construct blends between level design models learned…

We establish the undecidability of 2019 puzzle game Baba is You through a reduction from the Post correspondence problem. In particular, we consider a restricted form of the Post correspondence problem introduced by Neary (arXiv:1312.6700)…

Robot game is a two-player vector addition game played on the integer lattice $\mathbb{Z}^n$. Both players have sets of vectors and in each turn the vector chosen by a player is added to the current configuration vector of the game. One of…

We prove that three strategy video games from the Sid Meier's Civilization series: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, Sid Meier's Civilization V, and Sid Meier's Civilization VI, are Turing complete. We achieve this by building three…

Games on graphs provide a natural and powerful model for reactive systems. In this paper, we consider generalized reachability objectives, defined as conjunctions of reachability objectives. We first prove that deciding the winner in such…

We consider two-player turn-based games with zero-reachability and zero-safety objectives generated by extended vector addition systems with states. Although the problem of deciding the winner in such games is undecidable in general, we…

Mean-payoff games play a central role in quantitative synthesis and verification. In a single-dimensional game a weight is assigned to every transition and the objective of the protagonist is to assure a non-negative limit-average weight.…

Recursed is a 2D puzzle platform video game featuring treasure chests that, when jumped into, instantiate a room that can later be exited (similar to function calls), optionally generating a jar that returns back to that room (similar to…

Modern AAA video games feature huge game levels and maps which are increasingly hard for level testers to cover exhaustively. As a result, games often ship with catastrophic bugs such as the player falling through the floor or being stuck…

Infinite games where several players seek to coordinate under imperfect information are deemed to be undecidable, unless the information is hierarchically ordered among the players. We identify a class of games for which joint winning…

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.…

Weighted timed games are played by two players on a timed automaton equipped with weights: one player wants to minimise the accumulated weight while reaching a target, while the other has an opposite objective. Used in a reactive synthesis…

The automatic generation of game tutorials is a challenging AI problem. While it is possible to generate annotations and instructions that explain to the player how the game is played, this paper focuses on generating a gameplay experience…

We consider two-player games played on weighted directed graphs with mean-payoff and total-payoff objectives, two classical quantitative objectives. While for single-dimensional games the complexity and memory bounds for both objectives…

Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. Melee fighting game can be emulated on modern hardware allowing us to inspect internal memory states, such as character positions. We created an AI that avoids being hit by training using these internal memory…

Given a periodic placement of copies of a tromino (either L or I), we prove co-RE-completeness (and hence undecidability) of deciding whether it can be completed to a plane tiling. By contrast, the problem becomes decidable if the initial…

An increasingly common area of study in procedural content generation is the creation of level segments: short pieces that can be used to form larger levels. Previous work has used basic concatenation to form these larger levels. However,…