Games and Computational Complexity

Kavli Affiliate: Zeeshan Ahmed

| First 5 Authors: Zeeshan Ahmed, Alapan Chaudhuri, Kunwar Shaanjeet Singh Grover, Hrishi Narayanan, Manasvi Vaidyula

| Summary:

Computers are known to solve a wide spectrum of problems, however not all
problems are computationally solvable. Further, the solvable problems
themselves vary on the amount of computational resources they require for being
solved. The rigorous analysis of problems and assigning them to complexity
classes what makes up the immense field of complexity theory.
Do protein folding and sudoku have something in common? It might not seem so
but complexity theory tells us that if we had an algorithm that could solve
sudoku efficiently then we could adapt it to predict for protein folding. This
same property is held by classic platformer games such as Super Mario Bros,
which was proven to be NP-complete by Erik Demaine et. al.
This article attempts to review the analysis of classical platformer games.
Here, we explore the field of complexity theory through a broad survey of
literature and then use it to prove that that solving a generalized level in
the game "Celeste" is NP-complete. Later, we also show how a small change in it
makes the game presumably harder to compute. Various abstractions and
formalisms related to modelling of games in general (namely game theory and
constraint logic) and 2D platformer video games, including the generalized
meta-theorems originally formulated by Giovanni Viglietta are also presented.

| Search Query: ArXiv Query: search_query=au:”Zeeshan Ahmed”&id_list=&start=0&max_results=10

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