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Comment by numlocked | Hacker News Reader

This is the most interesting exchange in my opinion:

Do you think you integrate your Tetris skills into your everyday life?

Tetris has had a major impact on how I think about randomness. For example, it’s very hard for humans to estimate when things will occur, and a big part of that is recognizing that things are actually independent. Like, if there is an event with two outcomes of equal probability and the event has occurred as just one of the outcomes the past ten times, the probability that the next event will have the opposite outcome is still just 50%, not any greater.

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Isn't this called the Gambler's Fallacy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

Either way, it's interesting he mentions this, since quite a few video games are actively fixing the odds of random events so they do end up working like people might believe under said fallacy. For instance, certain RPGs (like Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft) actually change the odds of getting a rare item if the player fails to get lucky for too long, to the point where eventually they're pretty much guaranteed to get it.

NES Tetris has a weighted randomizer where it is less likely to get the same piece twice in a row (if the same piece is going to be served twice, the second is rerolled one time). So it is possible to get the same piece twice in a row but less likely.

Modern uses random shuffles of the piece order (put all the pieces in a bag and draw random pieces from the bag until the bag is empty).

He mentions that Modern Tetris has this: "And in Modern, they have this special randomizer that’s meant to be really fair".

That's one of the main reasons modern Tetris plays extremely differently than old Tetris. The game generates a "bag" with a single copy of all 7 possible tetrominoes. It then randomly pulls from the bag until it is empty, at which point it generates a new bag. This means you're guaranteed all possible pieces on a regular cycle.

At high-level competitive modern Tetris this allows you to plan out complicated structures like the 4-wide (<https://harddrop.com/wiki/4-Wide_Setups>). Rather than a big empty column on the far-left/right, you leave four empty columns in the middle (or alternatively the side). Once you have the setup, you can rely on planning and foreknowledge of the Tetris bag to guarantee yourself a 20-piece combo of single line clears. Due to the way battling works in modern Tetris (clearing lines sends "waste" to the bottom of the other player's screen with bonuses for combos + other stuff) this can instantly cause the other player to "top out".

Contrast with classic Tetris where just surviving is hard because you don't have any guarantees about pieces.

This is indeed a valuable lesson. But an interesting counterpoint I have heard is that if the event has occurred as just one of the outcomes the past ten times, you need to revisit your assumption that the two outcomes have equal probability. In many real-life scenarios, the probability that the assumption is incorrect may be greater than the probability of such a sequence of outcomes given the assumption. I think I read about this in Taleb's The Black Swan, though I'm sure it's an older idea than that.

// Do you think you integrate your Tetris skills into your everyday life

My brother in law and I both noticed we are much better at packing the car than our wives.

Specifically we both constantly rotate what we are loading in to take up all available space whereas our wives just put whatever is at hand next and lose a lot of space between items and thus not using the trunk efficiently.

We both attribute this to us playing lots of Tetris. I am gonna get my kids started on it as soon as they are ready.

I also attribute having played lots of Sokoban to ability to move furniture strategically.

I am sure being intrinsically spacial is required but these games definitely helped develop the skills.

There is a well-known male advantage in spatial object rotation. https://books.google.com/books?id=4s5WCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA356#v=on...

Interestingly, I have a similar experience (and not only compared to my spouse), yet I’ve only played Tetris maybe 3 times. People like to quip that I must play a lot of Tetris!

Same for me, people always say I must be great at Tetris, I might be good at Tetris, I don't know...never played. I do know however, I happened to have excellent spatial reasoning skills, don't need a map, strong visual memory, etc etc. I suspect other folks good at packing cars are probably strong with spatial reasoning and memory.

Seems there is some research into this - The neural basis of Tetris gameplay: implicating the role of visuospatial processing: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-021-02081-z

Isn’t that post hoc ergo proper hoc fallacy?

lmao he's wiser than all economists, most academics, and half of HN.

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