Gravity(Need explanation of the different forms of gravity in the various clones.) |
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Tengen (part of Atari), regardless, applied for copyright for their Famicom version of Tetris and proceeded to market and distribute it, blatantly disrespecting both Nintendo's and Elorg's rights to the game. After only a few (very popular) months on the shelf, the courts ruled that Nintendo had the rights to Tetris on arcade systems, and Tengen's version of Tetris was recalled. Nintendo released their version of Tetris for both the Famicom and the Game Boy and sold more than three million copies. The lawsuits between Tengen and Nintendo, however, carried on until 1993. |
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Tengen (part of Atari), regardless, applied for copyright for their Famicom version of Tetris and proceeded to market and distribute it under the name TETЯIS, blatantly disrespecting both Nintendo's and Elorg's rights to the name. After only a few (very popular) months on the shelf, the courts ruled that Nintendo had the rights to Tetris on arcade systems, and Tengen's TETЯIS game was recalled, having sold only about 50,000 copies. Nintendo released their version of Tetris for both the Famicom and the Game Boy and sold more than three million copies. The lawsuits between Tengen and Nintendo, however, carried on until 1993. |
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Normally, the player loses because they are no longer able to keep up with the increasing speed. But what if the speed didn't increase, or if you had perfect reflexes? |
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Normally, the player loses because *she can no longer keep up with the increasing speed, or *a specific implementation of the game with not very responsive control fails to keep up with itself when the pieces' downward velocity exceeds the maximum sideways velocity the player can apply to a piece. (Avid players consider this situation a design flaw.) But what if the speed didn't increase? |
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Eventually, you'd be forced to leave a hole in a corner. Suppose you then get a large sequence of identical S-shaped pieces of the opposite orientation. |
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Eventually, many implementations' approximation of gravity forces the player to leave a hole in a corner. Suppose you then get a large sequence of identical Z-shaped pieces. |
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So, if you play long enough, and your random number source is theoretically perfect, you will lose. Practically, this does not occur because the linear congruential [pseudorandom number generator]? in most implementations does not provide such a sequence. |
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So, if you play long enough, and your random number source is theoretically perfect, you will lose the game. (See also a more detailed discussion of this issue at http://www.geom.umn.edu/java/tetris/explanation.html, along with an implementation written in the Java programming language that has been modified to deal only S and Z pieces.) Practically, this does not occur because the linear congruential [pseudorandom number generator]? in most implementations does not deal such a sequence. Even on an implementation with a theoretically perfect RNG (for example, based on hashing Brownian motion), a good player can survive over 150 consecutive pieces selected from the set {S, Z}; the probability at any given time of the next 150 pieces being only S and Z pieces equals one in 4.08 * 1081. This number has the same order of magnitude as the number of atoms in the known universe (source: http://pages.prodigy.net/jhonig/bignum/qauniver.html). |
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