The Problem with Braid
This was a talk for the Pure Math Graduate Student Colloquium, where talks tend to be light-hearted and casual. I chose to give a talk about one of my favourite video games Braid, a puzzle-platformer with unique time mechanics. The talk follows a paper of Linus Hamilton, who shows that the question of if a given Braid level is beatable is fundamentally undecidable.
Braid is a puzzle game released in 2008 whose central mechanic revolves around time manipulation. The goal of any level is to manipulate different level elements so that you can reach the exit - but is this always possible to do? It turns out that answering this question in general is impossible to do, and we look at why this is the case.