No, it wasn’t just you: Super Mario Bros. is tougher than NP-hard

It’s OK, you’re old enough to admit it – you stunk at Super Mario Bros. The vaunted “feel” of Mario’s movement had you skidding into Koopas and off of cliffs, and the game eventually made you so frustrated that you eventually just played outside instead.

And hey, now there’s scientific proof that the game really is just that hard, despite what your friend Jesse – who beat the whole thing with sickening ease – told you. A new paper co-written by researchers at MIT, the University of Ottawa, and Bard College at Simon’s Rock says that Super Mario Bros. belongs to the complexity class PSPACE, meaning it’s more difficult to “solve” algorithmically than the famous traveling-salesman problem or factoring large numbers, which are referred to as NP-hard.

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