A popular use of tetrominoes is in the video game Tetris.
Counting rotations in two dimensions as equivalent, there are seven possible shapes:
_ _ _ _ |_|_|_|_|
_ _ |_|_| |_|_|
_ _ _ |_|_|_| |_|
_ |_| |_|_ |_|_|
_ |_| _|_| |_|_|
_ _ _|_|_| |_|_|
_ _ |_|_|_ |_|_|
When added the third dimension, there are three more patterns:
_ _ |_|_| |+| unit cube on top of +
_ _ |_|_| |+| unit cube on top of +
_ _ |_|+| unit cube on top of + |_|
Some people refer to the pieces by the colour in which they are drawn in a particular implementation of the Tetris game, but those colours vary from implementation to implementation so this is not very sensible. For example, in many older versions of Tetris, the red piece is I.
Piece | Vadim Gerasimov's
original Tetris | [Microsoft Tetris]? | [The New Tetris]? |
---|---|---|---|
I | red | red | cyan |
Square | blue | cyan | white |
T | brown | gray | yellow |
L | magenta | yellow | magenta |
J | white | magenta | blue |
S | green | blue | green |
Z | cyan | green | red |
See also: Domino, Pentomino, Polyomino?
References: