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Solve Practical Problems with Candy Crush?

Toby Walsh (University of New South Wales) has established that the addictive Facebook/smartphone game Candy Crush Saga belongs to the class of mathematical problems called NP-hard.

Further, Walsh found that Candy Crush Saga is NP-complete, as are such real-world problems as scheduling a travel route.

"It would be interesting to see if we can profit from the time humans spend solving Candy Crush problems," writes Walsh. "Perhaps we can put this to even better use by hiding some practical NP-hard problems within these puzzles?"

Read New Scientist's coverage.

Start Date: 
Monday, March 31, 2014