Tetris Challenge | Hacker News Reader

Tetris Challenge

tetrisapp.appspot.com

39 pointssanj13 comments

A buddy -- Craig -- of mine ported Tetris to X while at MIT.

Another buddy -- Randy -- wrote Tetrimatic, which intercepted the X events to figure out the board state and was, effectively, a robot that played Tetris.

For a while Tetrimatic was tearing up the high scores board.

If I remember right, Craig kept himself off the board, because in play testing, he'd gotten very, very good. And it didn't seem fair. He compiled a hacked version for himself that played at the highest level, but doubled the speed. It was crazy watching him play.

What I don't remember was if Craig decided to top the Tetrimatic robot on the high scores board.

Now I'm missing college...

Years ago you could play Tetris (though I think it was called Shapetris for copyright reasons) for money at WorldWinner.com, whose GUI was in Flash or Shockwave or whatever. I was really, really good at Tetris. Though I'm out of practice now, I probably had at least half of Gladwell's 10k hours of practice under my belt.

So, on World Winner I would get sick scores in the giant multiplayer tournaments there and still have like 1/10th of the score of the leader. I'm nearly certain they were bots. I remember seeing world champion scores back in the day on Ninetendo, and they weren't even double my high scores, so 10x would seem to be humanly impossible. The scoring system was a little different, but not that much.

Worse yet than the blatant botting, they had a ranking system that always forced you to play against people of similar skill to yours, so even in the head to head matches I'd quickly find myself playing against people (or bots) who had at least my skill level. That plus the 20% rake insured that even being in the top 0.1% of Tetris players wouldn't make you profitable, even if there weren't bots, which there almost certainly were.

s/copyright/trademark/

// nit

True.

This isn't really a big deal, but I just want to point out your reference to copyright because this has been an increasingly frustrating topic for me; most people don't know the difference between copyright, trademark, and patent, and don't fully understand how these intellectual property rights apply to the game Tetris.

Changing the name has nothing to do with copyright. The protection of a logo or name falls under trademark rights.

Copyright protects "original works of authorship including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic and other intellectual works like computer software" from being reproduced, distributed, and sold(USPTO). But, copyright does not protect game mechanics or rules.

A Patent does for a limited time protect a game concept/idea, but Tetris game concept lies in the public domain.

So, anyone can legally make and sell a Tetris/Tetromino/falling block game.

I am starting a blog series (http://desiree47.wordpress.com/2008/11/19/tetris-and-intelle...) covering IP, the Tetris Company, and iPhone Tetromino games. I have only covered patent law, but the rest is soon to come.

Interesting blog article. I can't wait to see the next post.

The concept of Tetris is pretty simple; many of guys here might have written some variation of it (I myself wrote one in Z80 assembler back in college to show my crude hand-made PC could be of some use :-) The "modern" Tetris has been evolved since then, though. I didn't realize that until I had a project with the official Tetris game. There are various rules that affect gameplay in subtle ways (have you heard of SuperRotation?). It is possible that somebody who is very good at the "good old" Tetris will not be good at the modern Tetris. I assume that's why the Tetris Company wants to define "The Tetris" to make sure people who play do play the same game. On what legal basis they do that, I don't know and that's why I'm curious where you'll go.

The site is written a lot like a splog. There are a few sentences that exist in multiple posts with few changes.

I will definitely get to your questions in my blog.

You're right. There are many novel and exciting ways to play tetromino games including network, combo, 4D, special block game play and much more. The concept is ever-evolving. But this is not solely due to the ingenuity of gaming companies to which the Tetris company grants use of their trademark.

Have you heard of TetriNET? Its a tetromino game that incorporates network game play and special blocks. It was released in 1997 and was the first tetromino game of its kind. Since then it has had many problems with the Tetris Company which has tried to shut it down. Interestingly though, in 1999, a new version of Tetris was released featuring “magical blocks” and two player game mode (The Magical Tetris Challenge).

Look all around and you will find new creative ways to play Tetromino games. Its not just “The official Tetris game” that has evolved. In fact, the official versions are usually the last ones to make modifications.

I know the difference, it was just a minor mistake. Lot of nits here today.

So what's the story behind this site? Has anyone tried it yet?

Partially answering my own question:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/python/python/696912

Could prove tricky. After all, Tetris is NP-complete: http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.CC/0210020

(kind of an interesting proof -- they reduce it to the problem of partitioning multisets of numbers into groups of equal sums)

The 5 second limit on request time has defeated me: http://superjoesoftware.com/misc/tetrisbuster.cgi http://pastebin.com/d347e754c

There was a similar challenge in the Ruby world recently for the game Battleship: http://sparring.rubyforge.org/battleship/index.html

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