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Comment by dkarras | Hacker News Reader

It's a weird thought I admit but as a computer game, I believe "Tetris" could have been independently "discovered". Board size - gravity rules - scoring etc. are arbitrary but there is some fundamental elegance about all possible tetrominos creating a game that is that fun. At the very least non tetris (so no creating and destroying lines) but a game with all possible tetrominos probably would exist.

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After tetrominos, purely mathematical games with pentomino tiling at its core are definitely discovered games. It's doable but not always simple to build a given shape of size 5n with n pentominos. Ever seen the "fill an n by m rectangle with pentominoes" problem?

As an aside, my favorite variant of this is from an old game Puzzle Pirates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRQIHyC__kc

I published a tutorial on procedurally generating pentominos:

https://rocketnine.space/post/tetris-1/

There's no actual gravity rules in Tetris. Pieces move downwards, but that's about it.

They move faster at higher levels, and the exact speeds and line clear requirements are arbitrary.

>They move faster at higher levels

Which proves it's not gravity -- gravity would move the same speed always (assuming a vacuum game stage), or would move proportionally to air resistance (so based on shape), etc.

Right, but this is called 'gravity' in the game, so I think it's what ggp was talking about

There is gravity, but Tetris pieces are dropped from very high, and have achieved terminal velocity by the time they reach your board.

I know we're firmly into joke territory at this point, but anyway, if that were true, then line pieces would fall faster when oriented vertically than horizontally.

Clearly the real answer is that Tetris is played in a weightless vacuum, and that pieces are shot at a constant speed from somewhere offscreen.

>Clearly the real answer is that Tetris is played in a weightless vacuum, and that pieces are shot at a constant speed from somewhere offscreen.

Obviously not, since the speed increases as the game progresses (of course the planet could have increased its mass in the meantime).

The speed the pieces are fired at is constant within each round, and then increases between rounds.

Obviously the tetrominoes are being fired by a variable speed railgun and the current is being increased with each round.

None of this is that important to the overall game, though. You can turn Tetris into a turn-based puzzle game where you have an unlimited amount of time to place each next piece, it just has to obey the same rules as having overhead clearance on it, and it's still the same game. This is effectively the game that AI players are playing anyway, since they think faster than the pieces fall and thus time is not a constraint for them.

I agree, I'm just clarifying what was meant by

> Board size - gravity rules - scoring etc. are arbitrary

So 'gravity rules' refer to falling speed, which is unimportant and doesn't fundamentally change the game, same with board size.

But do pieces accelerate AS they fall?

Is there a lock delay? What's the drop speed? How fast are soft drops?

There's dozens of Tetris variants, all with tiny little differences at this level, and they all contribute to different strategies.

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