Coordinating "7 Billion Humans" is hard

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that coordinating workers in the game '7 Billion Humans' is computationally hard, specifically NP-Hard or PSPACE-Hard, even in simplified versions, highlighting the complexity of such programming puzzles.

Contribution

The paper proves that even simplified versions of the game involve computational problems that are NP-Hard or PSPACE-Hard, revealing inherent complexity in programming coordination tasks.

Findings

Coordination problems in the game are NP-Hard.

Simplified versions of the game are PSPACE-Hard.

The complexity results highlight challenges in programming-based puzzles.

Abstract

In the video game "7 Billion Humans", the player is requested to direct a group of workers to various destinations by writing a program that is executed simultaneously on each worker. While the game is quite rich and, indeed, it is considered one of the best games for beginners to learn the basics of programming, we show that even extremely simple versions are already NP-Hard or PSPACE-Hard.