> Yes, you will get a lot of S pieces. But it doesn't give you solely S pieces - if that were the case, then it would be possible to make lines forever, which is much too easy.
This is actually wrong. Some friends of mine proved that if you drop only S and Z pieces in an irrational ratio, the player is doomed irrespective of the dimensions of the board.
I can’t, but it was published in Eureka (Cambridge Maths Society/Archimedean journal) somewhere between 1988 and 1993 I think. I don’t know how to get old copies but they were all typeset in TeX.
The same people also proved (earlier) that with 3-ominos its a win for the player.
Incidentally, if you’re into cool maths that isn’t part of any major research line, Eureka is a great read.
The proof that Tetris is a win for the computer was published in Eureka 51 (1992) by Richard Tucker. (Someone else has posted a link to another paper proving this, but it's from 1997; Richard got there first.)
The proof that Tris is a win for the player was published in Eureka 51 (1991) by Adam Chalcraft. Richard and Adam definitely know one another and I would be unsurprised to learn that they talked to one another about this stuff, but the actual writeups in Eureka were by different people.
(Quite possibly a substantial amount of the thinking was done collectively at meetings of the "Puzzles and Games Ring", a sort of sub-organization of the Archimedeans (the student mathematical society at the University of Cambridge, which publishes Eureka).
For about 15 years I've been trying to figure out how to articulate a `Tetris is life` essay. "Things are going good, you're given an S piece that doesnt fit anywhere. You have to decide where you'll put that blocking piece so that you can hopefully clear it later. This might be an unexpected car repair bill or a death that you aren't emotionally capable of addressing ... You're in control, you have a good job, a great partner, and yall are saving to buy a house -- basically waiting for an l piece to complete your `Tetris`..."
Anyway, this game of (ha)Tetris is a lot like a lot of people's lives, just roadblock after roadblock. While the normal version where you start from zero on level one is probably an upper middle class life. And Id say that the majority of people in the world start on level 6 with the board halfway filled with a bunch of gaps and the pieces move at a speed that is barely controllable (im thinking of the classic gameboy version when I imagine these boards)
Hatetris is cool. I couldn't get one line and I consider myself a damn good tetris player. It kept giving me S pieces and threw a Z in there and then an l
I realized half-way through that I had to get into a totally-different mindset than normal Tetris.
Normally, if the game gives you the wrong piece, you can put it where it will do the least damage for your current plans, and wait patiently for a better piece.
What you have to realize in this one is that the game will never give you the piece you want, if it has any option of giving you a worse one.
And so you have to play this like a Chess puzzle: how can I checkmate the game so that any piece it gives me will finish a line? How can I force it to either give me a piece that can fit in a 1x1 hole in the middle, or just give me 2x2 squares and I can complete the row with those.
It's quite different and fun when you think like that.
I also noticed the same thing - when I was making progress and got a particularly bad piece, the Tetris part of my brain thinks "I'll just put this out of the way for now".
Hatetris then gives me the same piece again. I think again: "I'll just put this out of the way for now"
I found it impossible to overcome this habit before running out of space.
I'd wondered about this. Baseball pitchers don't throw the worst pitch every time; you'd be expecting it. There has to be game theory here, too. Thanks for articulating it.
Thanks, that was a very helpful comment. I had to reason backwards from "in what situation I'm guaranteed a line", and then, how do I get there. I was able to get 4 lines with a few tries. Here's my base2048 encoded game
Not sure I would call it fun. Combine this with rubik’s cube solver robot, AI, smart contracts, AR/VR, neuralink and this could be daily life for everyone in the year 2030.
I got 5 lines. Experimented quite a bit. Trick is to build on vertical (if that makes any sense) and to try to keep open places for all types of pieces.
Same here. You can absolutely fill up the board in a way where there's almost no problematic sections, and then suddenly it's like. ok, well, no lines for you.
Same. I refuse to give google my credit card details or ID for this. I've been on Youtube for about 13 years with this account, I'd have to have been 5 or less to not be old enough to view whatever I want now... What garbage.
Seems to be a new "feature". I'm also getting this as of an hour ago! Pretty stupid if you ask me, since my account is linked to all my Android devices, where I have Google Play installed and have purchased apps with a CC, so verifying my CC again seems to be lazy or greedy on their part. Alternately submitting a photo ID says it may take up to 3 days to verify. We really need a YouTube competitor sooner than later.
Huh, so I clicked on make account and when I checked the "english instances" box, the first item in the instance list changed to Chinese. Guess that checkbox doesn't work so well.
It randomises the order. “English instances” just filters out instances which do not list English as a language; that doesn't mean English is the primary language of the instances that are left.
What about Windows? I hardly ever watch anything on my phone, the screen is much too small to be enjoyable. I just mean that since big G owns all of these products and happily links other preferences, they should also be able to link my CC.
I'd suggest that life is neither Chess nor Tetris, it's Magic the Gathering:
- You have to learn to relentlessly blame yourself for the mistakes you make, but also to accept that you can't change everything, and sometimes you WILL lose to random luck, no matter what you do.
- Actually understanding probability goes a long way.
- Regrettably, a large chunk of the game depends on your initial hand.
Which is probably why my favourite card game is now Dominion - everybody has the exact same starting position and access to resources. Too bad it doesn't extrapolate to the life analogy.
This argument reminds me of people who try to deny things like white privilege by describing how hard they had to work to get where they are now. Yeah, well, for a lot of people working hard (or not) isn't the only important factor that's determining their odds of success. That's the privilege...
I hate the framing of 'privilege', because it portrays these things as some special. unfair advantage, rather than other groups having a unfair disadvantage. You could say that poor people are 'housing privileged' as homeless people have it even worse, but I think it's absolutely clear what an awful thing that would be to say.
Being rich, famous or well-connected, that is 'real' privilege and should rightfully be called out. Not having to fear encounters with the police, not being discriminated in regards to employment or not being harassed on the streets are fundamental rights. Even if you don't care about being sensitive, telling people that they are privileged for having these is just so obviously counterproductive.
In a global perspective, it’s defined privilege if you are a white male in Europe or North America. You already have more opportunities than 99% of the world population.
But I wouldn’t use the words unfair advantage. Most of us didn’t cheat or do anything immoral to be born in this position, and trying to make our lives worse won’t help anyone else. The point isn’t to try to make us feel bad (not how I interpret it at least), but that we try to remember that we are very lucky people being born into this position, and that the overwhelming majority were less lucky than we are.
I think the term “privilege” was coined on purpose to flip the viewpoint and make us think about life in others’ shoes. “What you consider normal life is something they can only dream of”
I don’t think it’s meant to be a serious description of the situation
It is a really bad framing except when used on the original context, that is interacting with the kind of people that blame poverty on the poor life choices.
People using it to refer people that aren't acting like assholes should indeed drop that wording. It does nothing but antagonize people.
It sure sounds like you're the one being overly sensitive given that you're describing two equivalent states of affair and finding one of them offensive because you don't the words attached to it.
Well of course, there's a difference in connotation of blame between "privileged" and "disadvantaged", even if they both refer to the same relative difference. It's as if the terminology of "privileged" is purposefully trying to offend.
It is. The -point- of the term is to reverse the usual dynamic between the privileged and the disadvantaged. What that dynamic is depends on whether you see the categories in this comparison as only two (the haves and the have-nots) or three (including a "normal" category which lies somewhere between the two), or perhaps as a spectrum (where privileged and disadvantaged arguably lie at the extremes of the bell curve).
I'm saying I consider it insensitive to not care what effect your choice of words has on how people perceive things. If you think that makes me 'overly sensitive', then I'd recommend reflecting a bit on who is hurt by bad messaging. And if you don't believe me that it's bad messaging, just look up the studies on the effects of framing racial inequality as privilege.
Thanks for proving my point. I assume at this point that people who still don't understand the concept of privilege are being deliberately obtuse, so I'm not going to bother with you. The information is out there. You can choose to make an effort to understand or not.
Conditionality is applied in the concept: Privilege is essentially the difference in outcomes ascribed to two otherwise identical people due to a particular disadvantage that members of one group suffer but members of the other group don't.
This is in no way a rebuttal to what they said. The point is that privilege very well may exist and be a valid concept surrounding an aggregate, but be a invalid tool for comparing individuals.
Best I could do is five lines, and even that felt like it was because the game was optimized to prevent "any line now" rather than "any lines in future".
Method: If you lay the "s" pieces on their tip, next to each other horizontally, starting from one side, when you get to having a gap of two left on the other side, it changes to giving you line pieces. You can then lay these line pieces horizontally on top of the s pieces to create a full "wall" eight blocks wide all the way to the top. Then start filling in the two-wide column to start making lines. Best this seems to give is five.
Has anyone made it to six? Is it possible?
Edit: after reading more of the comments here, I see the high score is 31!!! Wow, didn't expect that -- it is neat to watch it through:
For about the same amount of years, I have thought of my life as playing multiple Tetris games at the same time. Some games moving at different speeds, depending on what's happening at the time on each. I'd focus my priority on the fastest moving games, without discarding the other (slower) games, since accumulation is non-stop.
...and yes, in my spare time (at times), I play multiple tetris games, but since I haven't found one that runs multiple games, I have to run many different windows--so I don't do it very often.
Anybody know of a Tetris game that allows you to add multiple games at the same time? That'd be awesome!
Wow, like every time I grab the old gameboy and play some rounds of tetris I just think the very same thing: tetris is a wonderful anology for life. And of course I did not expect someone else to think the same. Thank you! :)
Relevant parts of the Wikipedia article linked to by parent:
> Tetris 99 is a multiplayer puzzle game in which 99 players play against each other at the same time, with the aim to be the last player remaining. [...] As with normal Tetris rules, players have the option to store a tetromino piece to swap out at any time. By clearing multiple lines or performing continuous line clears in a row, players can send "garbage" to other players, which will appear on their board unless they can quickly clear lines in response. More garbage can be sent by completing combination moves in succession of making a "tetris" (matching 4 lines at once) or performing a "T-spin" (squeezing the T-shaped tetromino into a position it would otherwise not fall into by rapidly rotating it).
I believe that it may analyze the board for all possible piece placements for all pieces and then choose the piece that provides the least good solution.
Thanks. It's actually explained in the link on the github page after all. I just missed it the first time. It's what you say basically:
The method by which the AI selects the worst possible piece is extremely simple to describe (test all possible locations of all possible pieces, see which of the pieces' best-case scenarios is the worst, then spawn that worst piece), but quite time-consuming to execute, so please forgive me if your browser chugs a little after locking each piece. If you can figure out a way to accelerate the algorithm without diminishing its hate-filled efficiency, do let me know. The algorithm for "weighing" possibilities is to simply maximise the highest point of the "tower" after the piece is landed.
The author says that the algorithm couldn't be changed without invalidating the replays so I'm guessing that means it's a deterministic algorithm. Judging from the comment about "weighing" possibilities (which I interpret as evaluating boards) I'm further guessing it's an ad-hoc implementation of Best-First Search. In that case, I suspect its performance could be improved quite a bit by replacing it with a Monte Carlo search. But as the author fears, that would definitely invalidate replays (you'd get slightly different results each time).
Another optimisation is some kind of prunning heuristic- some kind of intuition about which pieces P don't need to be considered once a certain piece S has been rejected as the worst possible, because those other pieces P can only yield better boards then S (better for the player). No idea what that heuristic would look like, but the result would stay the same so the replays could still run as before.
An interesting challenge might be to make an "offline" version. How difficult a randomizer can you make without being able to see the player's board?
You'd lay down some rules such as "the pieces must theoretically have an even distribution over some period" and "piece sequences must come probabilistically and not hard coded."
You could then objectively test the randomizer by pitting a standardized bot against it.
Here's one with 6: РڠໃמୡඤVŦலڄໃݲథɊІށ௨ಘQɕ௫ҨໃυɷඞМǶ௨ళɱݹ୦Οຯ൫௩ƦഫJமϺຽߢ௧uܘܭЬ௨൧ݹಈඤʆٻҳචHݹಏටฅکҿࡄแחजலາƷ௧οາঐ௧চІͷ௨ౚໃŧԥఠܕɕϢ෯ƚݢƐٮඍԣரಀԀສߜƣƬѣݫΝթֆଔ
I suspect that there's some pathological behavior in the game you can exploit to possibly get a line or more while giving up a line (not that I searched and identified one, I think I just got lucky on my second game because I don't play tetris much so didn't have much of a strategy to unlearn). It would be interesting if there a few of these behaviors that lead into each other, which could lead to a stable state of infinite lines.
Not being random means there might be more to exploit.
The world record from 2017 is 31.
"௨ഖƌݯߜࠏІWƑsໃa௨೯ܘݷಳජଈیԪؼʥݺԥඞܘݲࠐڄໂঅமةໃݹ௧ړІٽ௨൞ໃZ௨ಘІܥࠐΣІZߜටȜখذජНݹߛeʛݹߤปເѧ௩ԚໂՉࢸටuа௨સȣݷłقෆঅਏeܘԔצقషݸɢڠຜঀಧҸມѧஐට༪൩ԊಅഫܡथsถԡԦԚໃɥஸقࡈɕɠɈไݸצقషݰਵϺФঅஓػݐɓԞуຯɕझࡈ๐ݞझࢶІݞमปദஈƉؿଭݪஸҩЂ൸ԛمϦGƁҨVھԥචЅշࡂ෮लݷƘණ໘ࠅƘಧНקࢻҨฆӘದԋϝପࠑ੧ͳݲடփරݞਵΚϼɢԒԺٳѦԤࠌξGಘسਯܥஶҋϮτथlϼʔ"
Your analogy suggests that life is 100% luck. Not everything in life is handed to you through luck like Tetris pieces falling from the sky. Your medical degree is largely dependent on you studying, working hard and finally clearing the requirements. Definitely a few shitty pieces to deal with though. It keeps things interesting. Most people revel in building their own blocks and not relying on stuff that falls from the sky.
Absolutely not true. I've know at least a dozen people that have gotten medical degrees, albeit on student loans. Working hard is the baseline, having a wealthy family helps with the financing aspects but not necessary. You could have tons of wealth, but still unable to attain medical degree if you don't work hard.
It's just an analogy. The main point is that most pieces are built by people, they don't just fall off the sky.
Your ability to work hard is dependent on things like your nutrition, genetic temperament, and general outlook on life as developed by your parents, friends, mentors and life experiences. It's not just a magical innate ability that exists if you believe hard enough. This type of thinking becomes a problem when you begin associating "working hard" with having a superior moral character that deserves to be rewarded while other less good individuals can suck eggs.
I mean, it really is all luck that we are born with a giant star providing us energy to sustain life on earth. You’re absolutely right. Lucked out with this beautiful sun!
We talk past each other when we do not specify the domain of the topic under discussion. At the highest abstraction it’s luck. We are lucky to have born as humans and not somewhere at the bottom of the food chain.
It’s impossible to have a productive conversation with these analogies and subjectivity of which abstraction layer we are talking about.
What this thread is about - “Nothing is in our control and everything is luck”. That’s a dull and uninteresting observation IMO. Also really uninspiring take on life and pursuit of excellence.
Maybe it's dull and uninteresting but unless you keep it in mind at every layer of abstraction, you run the risk of drawing incorrect conclusions. People tend to recognize this fundamental lack of control in only the most obvious cases like familial wealth, race, nationality, iq etc.. but completely ignore it in the more subtle and important distinctions between people like early childhood experiences, stress in the household, metabolism, serotonin levels, emotional tendencies and intellectual influences. The sheer complexity involved in all of these factors causes them to be treated differently and unfairly reduced to "idk some people just get ahead in life because they work harder."
I partial agree, it's complex. Meritocracy is better than ever and most things in life can be directly deduced to initiative, work ethics, personal drive, ambition and ability to have self control. There is an amazing book "Deep Work" that goes in-depth the work ethics of successful people.
You also left out the biggest and the most important luck factor - Physical attractiveness. There are several studies in the field of psychology to mundane daily anecdotal evidence of how attractive people have a lottery ticket. I don't see this as a negative thing - genetic diversity is literally how human's evolve and natural selection works.
Open-ended homework for those who are interested: solve the same problem, but with actual Tetris rules.
I've seen a bunch of those "adversarial tetris" variants, and they all operate under the assumption that any of the seven pieces can appear at any time, and with only one preview.
Modern Tetris has 3 previews + hold, and pieces are drawn randomly "from a bag", without replacement (more formally, if P[i] is the sequence of pieces, each aligned subsequence of 7 pieces must be a permutation of the tetrominos).
This would be more interesting to make/play. Note that under such rules there exists a strategy that allows infinite play if the well is at least 17 tiles high.
To be fair, the random piece selection is how the Tetris on the NES and GB worked, which is how many Americans were introduced to Tetris. Getting 5 Z or S pieces in a row was definitely something that happens regularly in those versions.
An interesting note about the versions that use the piece bag strategy is that the game can be solved. It's possible to play until the game speeds up to the point where you can no longer get a piece to the edge of the screen before it hits the bottom. https://tetris.wiki/Playing_forever
The most popular Tetris was the original, it is one of the most sold video games ever, and it didn't even allow you to hold a piece. That is what people think of when they hear Tetris, it isn't old enough that the people who played it back then are dead.
It's actually doubtful most people have even seen the original, let alone played it ;)
Still, Nintendo's Tetris implementations on NES and Game Boy are both early and among the best-known versions, neither of which use a piece bag.
NES Tetris is both a pretty good implementation to be enjoyable, and it's unchanging in a way that makes it ideal for competition. It is gaining new players to this day.
For anyone wondering, the original implementation was on a PDP-11 clone called Electronika 60 https://tetris.wiki/Tetris_(Electronika_60) ... not the 1989 Game Boy version most people consider to be the "original" :)
I've got the backplane and boards to build a more-or-less LSI-11, the original system cloned by the Electronika 60. One day I really want to load the original Tetris onto it somehow... Would probably have to use a terminal emulator to get the Cyrillic character set to render, but I bet it's possible!
> NES Tetris is both a pretty good implementation to be enjoyable, and it's unchanging in a way that makes it ideal for competition. It is gaining new players to this day.
Not only new players, but also new techniques (for fast side movement):
After 1. DAS (holding the d-pad) and 2. Hypertapping (rapidly tapping the d-pad with one finger) now there is 3. Rolling (rapidly tapping the controller with multiple fingers in succession). The geekiness is strong with these.
I would at minimum like to play this with a Hold option. I'm not a huge fan of the mechanic in normal Tetris, because IMO dealing with and recovering from unfortunately-timed pieces is a key part of the game. But, that's not really an issue here!
Hold changes the game enough that if you don't like it I can't blame you, but it's not about recovering. It's about storing T pieces to allow B2B TSD to be performed safely, without the threat of 5-10 lines of garbage coming your way. In general, I fall on the side of those who like it because it opens the game to more variation in strategies. Removing hold would also be a buff to strategies that aren't particularly fun to play against like 4-wide.
But that's for PvP games. IMO, the problem with modern Tetris rules is that they're optimized for PvP modes at the expense of marathon mode.
In marathon mode, the only garbage blocks are the mess you create for yourself. These arise naturally from situations such as (1) receiving the wrong piece at the wrong time and (2) failing to maneuver a piece correctly before it locks. It is good for these situations to arise naturally during the course of the game.
If I was in charge of Tetris, I would retain Hold, EasySpin, and piece previews in PvP games where they make sense, but I'd disable them in marathon mode.
HN cut this off so I couldn't copy and paste it without opening developer tools. I can't find a way to put the code in a HN comment without breaking it, but you can go here and copy and paste:
This should work. Prefixed it with two spaces to trigger codeblock. If you double click to highlight and then copy, the app will automatically .trim() the input so the spaces should not matter.
Speaking of Tetris and Hatetris, have you ever heard of Hatris? I just learned about it from last week's No Such Thing as a Fish podcast. Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, continued to experiment with the Tetris formula. One of the games he made was called Hatris[2] which involves hats falling on people's heads. Entertainment Weekly reviewed it saying: "There is, after all, a cure for Tetris addiction. It’s Hatris.[3]"
I don't think the creators of it quite anticipated how effective the center-merge strategy could be at keeping the board clear, at least based on their surprised Twitter reactions to users (including myself) achieving scores into the low 7 figures.
But given that the game has no timer or really anything that explicitly escalates the difficulty over time, once you figure out how to maintain steady state, you can theoretically play indefinitely (though it does very occasionally crash).
This has raised an interesting question for me about what it would look like to have a version of High Rise with an adversarial bot choosing your pieces. Perhaps the bot's "meanness" of selection could escalate as you get into higher scores, with some kind of checkpoint system to start the game at certain milestones/hardnesses once you've proven you can consistently achieve them through ordinary play.
I find his fiction pretty good. He also wrote Ra and Fine Structure (both available on his qntm.org website and as physical books on amazon).
As with most fiction written online, it could probably use an editor. But it's as good as a lot of more conventionally published scifi AND it's covering topics that I haven't been able to find other authors interested in covering.
I can't tell if there is actually a story by that title and it's not linked to for the obvious reason... or if that title just refers to the other related stories.
I love that this comment and its sibling contradict each other, confounding the question even more. It makes me hesitant to ask you for a link to the story.
Well, our team made an android version of bastet, renamed as bastard blocks.
It was a quite interesting experiment understanding the original code, and trying to 'improve' (or worsen) the board analysis on Unity and C#
Haha, it gives you an S (Z), except when you are about to fill up a line. (place SSSSS together, filling the bottom space). Then it gives you a I. At some point it gave me an L and a J. The darn thing is really mischievous!
You spelled Monotonous wrong ;) It basically gives you the worst piece (Z) every time unless there's another worst piece. I got a 4 bar line OOOO and also an L once.
Overall I just wasn't impressed. It reminds me of the level of tetris you'd reach after beating all the easier levels only to find that you got to the level that the game creators decided nobody could ever win because they didn't write an ending sequence.
Is there a minimal guaranteed optimal play for the game of tetris (not just hatetris as linked here). Or phrased another way, if you play against the smartest, most devious AI, what's a score that you cannot get past.
The high score of hatetris seems to be 31 lines, but it seems that it may be taking advantage of the algorithm being myopically giving you the worst piece 1 step ahead, and being deterministic. I wonder if the algorithm has some randomness (among multiple horrible pieces) and multi-step look ahead, how would that affect the high score.
Has anyone done research on tetris's worst case bounds?
Good grief, I'm angry and stressed even though I was just interacting with a simple hostile algorithm. I felt personally attacked. This thing has fascinating psychological implications.
Want to give a shout out a nice but relatively unknown tetris inspired game Tritris. It is open source [1] and you can see the author gave much thoughts into mirroring what makes tetris a great game in his intro video [2].
Ok you guys, all the base-64 Tetris lines in here are breaking the layout of this page. Not because of base-64 or Tetris; it's the long unbroken lines. Usually I succumb to psychological pressure and edit them (by adding whitespace and—yes—telling the commenter we did so), but there are so many here that you've broken me.
If anyone figures out how to fix HN's CSS so that it doesn't do this anymore, without breaking anything else, we will find some way to glorify you. One helpful user seemed to come close, but ended up having better things to do. Others have come close, but the changes broke something else. It may not be that hard, but my body rejects learning enough CSS to find out.
(Also, yes, HN's HTML and CSS and general layout, and many other visible things about the site, are old-fashioned and weird and perhaps even trollish when you look at them a certain way and Mercury is in Leo; but anything one might say about that was probably already a cliché 10 years ago, so it would be good not to go there if you'd be so kind. It is what it is.)
I think what's interesting about this is the tendency for it to give you the same piece over and over again. That is, until you've tricked it enough that the same piece will clear a line, then it will give you the next piece over and over.
As it relates to real Tetris, it's usually the case that the same piece given multiple times in a row does in fact cause the most problems (at least for me).
What is the algorithm in normal Tetris for delivering pieces? Is it completely random, or is there a bit of "frustration" added to the piece distribution?
This is a good example of structuralism. The rules of the game are exactly the same but the rules for determining which piece is next change which strategy is successful.
My son bought me an original Game Boy with Tetris for Christmas for its sentimental value. Turned out to be a real challenge.
If you're used to the current versions, going back in time is crazy hard! No hold pieces, a single preview, the pieces lock-in as soon as they touch, and the randomness is truly random. I was astounded by how hard these small changes make the game. I had totally forgotten!
I managed to reach 11: సقແࡆ௨౾ܘݸథ৩ໄɕஐփЂঅࢳइະࠇஶقງыதقݍݹলজຽࠇ௧රІރ௨ගͲວ௨ඦϼɕறقؼݑђ੬ໃŦߜඦഫݹԥറІܯࡑق༢ڢ௨ڞܘࡇ௧ڠງڣݹ୮ܬŦஜυషKϢټຽࠇ௰ඪܘܭݳ൝ඤτரػଇœԤڏ૭ɔԥ౾ಋ൳ݢऋخӷࡑ୩πںڲת෧uਮڝƜݢशԹసດࡓౚઈڭਧօ5
I don't understand how it can possibly select the "worst piece". As far as I've always believed, Tetris is np complete. Now I understand that in very simple terms you could say for one move that a piece looks difficult, but in the long run it could turn to have been a a great piece.
I had fun with this, it's a great concept and well executed.
Except it did not work well for me at all on mobile. The playing field and the buttons were really tiny (half the size of my finger) and missing them ever so slightly caused the board to zoom in and ignore my next press.
I feel like there's some bug where it gives me S's when a Z would clearly be worse. I managed 3 lines, all of which were completed by S's and would have been thwarted by Z's.
In fact I'm not sure I got a Z all game, though it seems other commenters did.
Given the tiles are algorithmically rather randomly (as in normal Tetris) chosen, is there an optimal play? A trendy computational approach will be to utilize a neural network ala AlphaZero.
I feel like there should be a middle ground alternative where its normal tetris for awhile but then it just goes nasty. First it lulls you into a false sense of security and proficiency then it strikes hard.
I got several square pieces, because I was able to get to a state where any other piece would fit into the remaining 1x1 hole, and so a square piece was the only thing that would block me.
I got 6. Surprisingly, that seems like that's pretty good based on the comments. Basically stacked across the vertical (starting right and worked my way left).
If you can't figure out how to score a row from only S's (it's not intuitive, because it's not what you'd do in normal Tetris if you got several S's), then it will keep giving you those.
Once you work out how to make a line with S's, it will give you something else before you complete it.
