Do not think Mario games are easy because it is old and many kids are playing it. Mario is actually difficult. You think other people have no problem playing it? You are wrong.
NP-hard (non-deterministic polynomial-time hard) means problems that are at least as hard as the hardest problems in NP. Mario and and many games such as Zelda, Pokemon, and are considerred as NP-hard. It meas it can be very hard for a player. Here are some examples of Pokemon and Zelda problems.
According to Jacob Aron. Each game can be transformed into a logical puzzle called Boolean satisfiability problem. It is used to determine if variables of a given Boolean formula can be assigned in such a way as to make the formula evaluate to TRUE. For the games, elements suchs as enemies and mushrooms are assigned as variables in formulas to deteremine if they allow a game level to complete and produce true or make a game level impossible and produce false. In the result, games like Super Mario Bro. are proven to be NP-hard.
Mario games are also NP-complete. Many difficult problems can be classified into the NP-complete catogory. For examples, Salesman and knapsack problems are NP-complete; they require of finding the shortest route between series of points, and how to allocate resources.
Here is just an example of very hard Mario game. (video contains coarse language. Viewer discreption is advised)
It is not common to run into Goomba or not be able to jump over the bottomless pit. Since Mario is proven to be a very hard game, dont feel bad to see “GAME OVER” many times.
Reference
1. NewScientist. Jacob Aron. Mario is hard, and that’s mathematically official. [Accessed March 14, 2012. ]
2. Kotaku. Luke Plunkett. Science Proves Old Video Games Were Super Hard. [Accessed March 14, 2012. ]
2. Wikipedia. [Accessed March 14, 2012. ]
