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Ideal Tetris Theory

Yahweh

Philosopher
Y
Joined
Apr 7, 2003
Messages
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I wanted to totally beat Ceptimus' highscore in Tetris at the Freethought Forum, and I found the scoring formula of Tetris on Wikipedia:
The scoring formula for the majority of implementations of Tetris is built on the belief that more difficult line clears should be awarded more points. In Nintendo's implementations on the NES, Game Boy, and SNES, the four possible line clears are as follows:

1. Single = (level+1)*40 one line is cleared.
2. Double = (level+1)*100 two lines are simultaneously cleared.
3. Triple = (level+1)*300 three lines are simultaneously cleared.
4. Tetris = (level+1)*1200 four lines are simultaneously cleared.

Code: 
Level 	00 	01 	02 	03 	04 	05 	06 	07 	08 	09 	10
Single 	40 	80 	120 	160 	200 	240 	280 	320 	360 	400 	440
Double 	100 	200 	300 	400 	500 	600 	700 	800 	900 	1000 	1100
Triple 	300 	600 	900 	1200 	1500 	1800 	2100 	2400 	2700 	3000 	3300
Tetris 	1200 	2400 	3600 	4800 	6000 	7200 	8400 	9600 	10800 	12000 	13200
Click to expand...
I'm a pretty good Tetris player, my technique has always been placing my pieces to get as many lines as possible (I get a lot of single lines), but I think there might be a better way. In a game of Tetris, there ought to be a way to maximize points by getting single-lines some percentage of the time, doubles some other percentage of the time, and so on.

I've been looking, but I havent come across anything on the subject. Is there a serious ideal technique to play Tetris?
 
My dad had a technique: he would use a "slowdown.exe" program to slow it to nil, and give him as much time as he needed to contemplate his next move.
 
Yahweh said:
I'm a pretty good Tetris player
Click to expand...
Ha! Check out my highscores in the other two Tetris games at the freethought forum, as well as the one at mu.nu I hold all the Tetris trophies there.

On each of those games, you get to see the next piece as well as the current one. You have to consider what the playing area will be like after BOTH pieces have landed to play optimally.

I try to leave a channel down one side to drop the long pieces in (so as to get the 4-line bonuses) but once the pile gets more than 6 squares high, I abandon that strategy and try to complete as many rows as possible, so as to get the pile height back down to something manageable.

You don't have time to think on the later levels - you just have to react - it takes lots of practice. Don't change your mind once you've decided where to place a piece - changing your mind while the piece is falling usually ends in a disastrous mistake.

Edit to add: It was slimshady2357 who taught me the 'get the tetrises' technique. Before that, I used to go for just complete lines and not bother with the bonuses.
 
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Yahweh said:
I've been looking, but I havent come across anything on the subject. Is there a serious ideal technique to play Tetris?
Click to expand...

A version of Tetris where the player knows all the pieces in advance has been proved to be NP-complete, meaning that it is a pretty difficult problem. Optimized versions of NP-complete programs tend to be even more difficult ranging from DeltaP2 to SigmaP2 depending on the definition of optimality. Without doing any formal analysis at all, my educated guess would be that DeltaP2 would be the correct class.

Analyzing the real version where the player doesn't know the sequence of the blocks is more difficult and to my knowledge no one has done that.

And now some short primer on complexity theory. The difficulty of solving a problem is expressed in the terms of time or space that is needed to solve the problem. The most important complexity classes are:
  • P: the problem can be solved in a polynomial amount of time with respect to the problem size.
  • NP: the answer to the problem can be checked in a polynomial amount of time. (All existing complete algorithms for NP problems use at least an exponential amount of time to find the answer).
  • PSPACE: the problem can be solved using a polynomial amount of space.
The three classes order in such way that P is believed to be easier than NP and NP easier than PSPACE (The first person to either prove this or refute it will become a millionaire).

Informally, a problem is complete with respect to some complexity class if it as hard as the hardest problems that belong to it.

The two strange looking complexity classes that I included above are defined using the concept of an oracle. The idea is that an oracle is some mysterious black-box machine that can instantly solve some problem. In both classes we use an NP-oracle, that is, a black box that answers NP-complete problems.
  • DeltaP2 is the class of problems that can be solved in a polynomial time if we have an NP-oracle.
  • SigmaP2 is the class of problems whose answers can be checked in a polynomial time if we have an NP-oracle.
 
I always created a channel one block wide on the third column in from either side. This facilitated placing matching pieces (and those darn squares!) without leaving too many spires to deal with, and was always good for dropping the long piece into.

I haven't played Tetris in quite a while. I kind of miss it. A simple, elegant, addicting game.
 
I go for the empty column on one side, and I usually have the other side devoted to S and Z blocks.

Never had any trouble with squares. I always keep some place with two adjacent level blocks open. Not by conscious effort, though.

Can't remember where I read it, but apparently you can't play Tetris indefinitely, even with perfect reflexes: Sooner or later, the pseudorandom generator is going to give you a long, long stretch of nothing but S or Z blocks.
 
Ahh, Tetris. I remember it from the old DOS days using a CGA color adapter. Crude graphics of the Kremlin etc. in the background. And I remember my delight in discovering finally that you could rotate the peices as well as move them left and right.
 
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