Is your lack of finesse when it comes to Super Mario Brothers the source of all your shame and embarassment? Wipe those tears — a paper written by international team of computer scientists has proven that Super Mario Brothers is just really, really hard.
The paper, titled “Classic Nintendo Games are (NP-)Hard,” examines five Nintendo classics that are known as “NP-hard” in computer science terms.
As Alex Armstrong of iProgrammer explains, these involve computing problems that “are most difficult to solve by computational means because the time it takes to find a solution tends to increase so quickly with the size of the problem that it just isn’t practical to perform the computation.”
As the study finds, classic Nintendo games are a perfect example, but not all Super Mario Brothers games are the same in that respect. According to the researchers, Super Mario Brothers Lost Levels Edition (a Japan-only release,) isn’t an “NP-hard” game due to “Mario’s newfound ability to pick up Koopa shells.”
