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The Computational Complexity of Portal and Other 3D Video Games

Authors Erik D. Demaine, Joshua Lockhart, Jayson Lynch

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Author Details

Erik D. Demaine
  • MIT CSAIL, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Joshua Lockhart
  • Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK
Jayson Lynch
  • MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA

Funding

  • Lockhart, Joshua: Work started while author was at School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK

Cite As Get BibTex

Erik D. Demaine, Joshua Lockhart, and Jayson Lynch. The Computational Complexity of Portal and Other 3D Video Games. In 9th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2018). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 100, pp. 19:1-19:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2018) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.FUN.2018.19

Abstract

We classify the computational complexity of the popular video games Portal and Portal 2. We isolate individual mechanics of the game and prove NP-hardness, PSPACE-completeness, or pseudo-polynomiality depending on the specific game mechanics allowed. One of our proofs generalizes to prove NP-hardness of many other video games such as Half-Life 2, Halo, Doom, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Grand Theft Auto, Left 4 Dead, Mass Effect, Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid, and Resident Evil. These results build on the established literature on the complexity of video games [Aloupis et al., 2014][Cormode, 2004][Forisek, 2010][Viglietta, 2014].

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Problems, reductions and completeness
Keywords
  • video games
  • hardness
  • motion planning
  • NP
  • PSPACE

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References

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