Remember the original Super Mario Bros. video game? You know, the one that made you want to throw your controller out of the window when you couldn’t get past the first level? Turns out, you weren’t just imagining the difficulty level. By battling Bowser and navigating through brick structures, you were actually doing the equivalent of solving complicated mathematical equations, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found.
The University recently published a paper that confirms completing a game of Super Mario Bros. is “as hard as the hardest problems in the ‘complexity class’ PSPACE, meaning that it’s even more complex than the traveling-salesman problem.” In other words, playing the iconic game is apparently harder than factoring large numbers belonging to the complexity class known as NP. NP problems, scientists say, are reportedly “very, very hard” to complete without a computer, unlike their counterpart P problems.
Researchers assert that the “paper doesn’t attempt to establish that any of the levels in commercial versions of Super Mario Bros. are PSPACE-hard, only that it’s possible to construct PSPACE-hard levels from the raw materials of the ‘Super Mario’ world,” according to a news release. Results of the study are enlightening and have researchers excited. “Mathematically, video games are not very different from computational models of real-world physical systems, and the tools used to prove complexity results in one could be adapted to the other,” the release says.
Looks like all those hours of playing video games didn’t go to waste after all.