He then uses graph theory to prove that any game exhibiting both location traversal and single-use paths is NP-hard, that’s the same class of complexity as the travelling salesman problem.

The complexity class NP is a set of problems whose solutions can be verified in polynomial time, even if finding those solutions takes -- as far as anyone knows -- exponential time.

If you've never heard of computational complexity theory, the best known example is the traveling salesman problem (TSP), which is NP-hard.

An analysis of the computational complexity of video games, including those in the Mario and Legend of Zelda series, proves that many of them belong to a class of mathematical problems called NP-hard.

They have a mathematical, analog “solver” that can potentially find the best solution to NP-hard problems. NP-hardness is a theory of computational complexity, with problems that are famous for their ...

Super Mario Bros Proved NP-Hard Ever wondered how hard those computer games really were? Now computer scientists have proved the computational complexity of various classic Nintendo games ...

However, in spite of the vast effort, the complexity of the problem remains unresolved. In this paper, we provide a proof that the problem is indeed strongly NP-hard.