
Tetris Challenge - sanj
http://tetrisapp.appspot.com/static/howto.html
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sanj
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...

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mattmaroon
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.

~~~
DXG
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...](http://desiree47.wordpress.com/2008/11/19/tetris-and-intellectual-
property-rights-patent/)) covering IP, the Tetris Company, and iPhone
Tetromino games. I have only covered patent law, but the rest is soon to come.

~~~
shiro
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.

~~~
DXG
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.

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Locke
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>

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dangrover
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)

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

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

