Classic Nintendo Games Are NP-Hard

mikejuk writes "You may have have thought games like Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, and so on were hard at the time you were playing them, but you probably didn't guess they were NP-hard. Now we have some results from computer scientists at Universite Libre de Bruxelles and MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that many classic games contain within them an NP-hard problem. It has been proven that the following game franchises are NP-hard (PDF): Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Metroid and Pokemon. At least you now have an excuse for your low scores."

Comments

For a gentler introduction

[tepples]

There are three classes of problems at issue here:

• NP, problems for which you can verify a solution in polynomial time (e.g. O(x^2) or O(x^3) operations);
• NP-hard, problems that are at least as hard as the hardest problems in NP; and
• NP-complete, problems that are both NP and NP-hard.

For a gentler introduction, see P vs. NP.