Still Up  If you can read this, this site survived a server
migration. Whether it survives authorial inattention is TBD.
Super Mario Bros. is NP-complete (sort of)  I recently stumbled
across (via Scott Aaronson’s blog) an academic computer science
paper that proved that Super Mario Bros. is NP-complete, and so
are Donkey Kong Country, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and
Pokémon. Or, to be more precise, the decision problem of whether
a level in any of those games is winnable is NP-complete.  Don’t
get too excited about this result, however. It doesn’t mean
you’re going to be able to pick up a NES controller and suddenly
be able to solve intractable problems with ease.  Informally, an
NP-complete problem is the hardest type of question where there
is no known way to figure out the answer quickly, but it is
possible to quickly verify that an alleged answer is true. The
Boolean satisfiability problem is one well-known NP-complete
problem: given an arbitrary Boolean formula, is there some way
to assign values to