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undecidable

Undecidability Reduction

Paper and Result

The 2020 paper “Recursed is not Recursive: A Jarring Result” by Demaine, Kopinsky, and Lynch (ISAAC 2020) proves that deciding whether you can win a level of the video game Recursed is RE-complete, which implies that there is no finite algorithm to solve the problem (undecidability).

Screenshots

Here are "screenshots" (actually SVG renderings of the rooms produced by SVG Tiler) of some of the key rooms in the level (as generated by the Makefile). See the paper for details about how the rooms work and interconnect.

Specific Example

The specific level presented here is a minimal example of the reduction from that paper, representing an instance of the Post Correspondence Problem with just two dominoes: [a|ab] and [ba|b]. The level is winnable (by selecting each domino once in turn), but it is quite difficult to do so in practice.

Output Level

Lua level generated by recursed-xls2lua

To play the level, put the Lua file into Recursed's custom/missions folder; see these instructions.

Input Spreadsheet

The level above is generated by recursed-xls2lua from this .xlsx input file, which in turn is exported from this Google Sheet.