Cheating at Tetris

xandrius•about 1 hour ago

Picking 100,000 blocks for this challenge shows how little the author knows about tetris. A "kill screen" in the traditional tetris averages around 2000-4000 blocks (rough estimate). And that's already pretty hard to reach.

Someone good at tetris would never take such a challenge because they know how much that is. While a mathematician who just want to make a catchy post seemingly would.

I believe that even if you sent the "worst" configuration of blocks, a really good player would be able to stick around for 500-1000 blocks every time (unless glaring mistakes), especially if they expect an attacker choosing the blocks. If the attacker chooses random, that would actually be an advantage since the real game chooses pieces almost at random (AFAIK it's not pure random).

So, this post is like challenging someone who's good at tennis at making 100,000 of shots every single time: it's just orders of magnitude so off, that the player would know you're a total noob simply for asking.

hasyimibhar•29 minutes ago

Typically it's not pure random, instead they randomize the ordering of the 7 pieces, otherwise called the 7-bag system. Some games use different bag size, e.g. 35-bag system used in TGM3. AFAIK with 7-bag, a good Tetris player can play pretty much indefinitely, assuming that the speed of the falling pieces never increase, and that they can pause the game to take rests.

I used to play Nullpomino (an open source tetris game) for hours. It has a mode called marathon, where the goal is to play as long as possible. It's normal to see good players surviving for hours, even with increasing level. Here's an example of someone playing for 1h, 90% at level 20 (at level 20, pieces appear immediately at the bottom): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHXxKywAQME

valadaptive•about 1 hour ago

Yes, the article says this at the end:

> In regular Tetris games, the speed at which the blocks fall steadily increases. This causes players to make more and more mistakes and, just like the holes in the S and Z columns, these mistakes will stack up until game over is inevitable. Ultimately, small mistakes due to the time constraints will likely be what causes your friend to lose the challenge, so you probably won’t have to wait 69,600 blocks to beat your friend.

xen0•about 1 hour ago

Indeed, at 3 pieces per second (I don't have a good sense of how fast good tetris players play, but I've seen some videos and it looks like they can average more than one a second), it's 10 hours of constant play.

Playing at such a speed for 10 hours is kind of insane. Playing it without error is not human.

crtasm•about 3 hours ago

and time for a quick game of https://qntm.org/files/hatetris/hatetris.html

Cheating at Tetris

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