Implication of P =NP on video games?

Question

I was wondering if NP problems were actually solvable in P time, then what will be the impact on Video Games, if any ?

Answer 1

Depends on whether or not they also developed an effective algorithm for solving some NP-complete problems. Just knowing that the two classes are related doesn't necessarily tell you how to solve it in P time.

And being able to solve something in polynomial time doesn't mean that you can solve it very quickly: If the running time of the algorithm is n^3 * one googleplex, it's still polynomial time but probably not practically solvable.

And anyway, the only problem that I know of that is NP-complete that is remotely related to video games is the Travelling salesman problem, so better pathfinding algorithms?

So in short, I doubt it would have much impact. Though it does very much depend on HOW it is proven. Since our current methods don't seem to work, a proof would most likely be a great leap forward in mathematics, provided it was a proof method that could be applied to other problems.