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AI Plays Tetris and Beats World Record

Cube, Tetris, Play, Blocks, artificial intelligence
Tetris Game

The ever-growing power of artificial intelligence never stops to amaze us. Now, it sets a mind-blowing world record.


Australian coder Code Bullet created an artificial intelligence program that beat the current world record for the longest Tetris game of 4,988 lines which is currently held by gamer Harry Hong. Even the whole Tetris game was programmed by the coder. It seems impressive to see how he builds everything from scratch and breaks the world record!


What is A.I. Tetris?

Tetris is a tile-matching video game where the goal is to destroy the lines of tiles (or blocks) strategically to prevent them to stack to the top of the screen. Human intelligence supported with artificial intelligence showed some marvelous results for Tetris. The video uploaded by Bullet shows A.I. has cleared about 14,000 lines of the blocks in the game of Tetris. He also mentions in the video that the A.I.-powered game can go up to infinite lines. 


"Playing 'Tetris' for 15 minutes is like meditation."

~ Ezra Koenig


How Does A.I. Tetris Works?

This game works on a simple algorithm that is to pick the best move out of all the possible moves, which is the “backbone” of artificial intelligence. Good moves and bad moves are classified by assigning points depending on some parameters and the one with the highest score is considered the best move (reinforced learning). 

  • Minimize global holes: block spaces that are left empty between or under your pieces and cannot be filled further (these holes are considered bad), will result in fewer points to that move i.e. it will be considered a bad move. So A.I. will optimize itself by selecting the moves which will have least or no spaces left.

  • Minimize the height of stacks: only reducing the holes is not enough, stack height should also be minimum as the purpose is to eliminate complete rows and prevent stack to reach the top of the screen. So, this parameter plays an important role in the algorithm.

  • Check hold piece: (it is a piece at the top corner which can be exchanged by the current piece until it locks) best end position of the current piece is compared with that of the hold piece and the better one is used.

  • Minimize empty pillars: further optimization of the algorithm requires filling of empty pillars (since they can only be filled by line pieces, and needs to be minimized), this problem is solved by penalizing the moves which resulted in an empty pillar of three or more blocks. 

And this is how artificial intelligence-powered Tetris broke the world record (however, there is no legitimacy of the record as the whole game was programmed by the programmer himself and was not official Tetris).


Our Take on This

We feel that although it is really cool to have AI perform such tasks, it is useless and not really a directed approach to improving the general intelligence of AI by making it well-versed in gaming. A human playing Tetris might have used a multitude of skills to reach a certain level, although AI does not develop skills because of training under an infinite-sample of data for a specific task.


Bibliography:

https://nerdist.com/article/coder-tetris-ai-world-record/

https://geekologie.com/2020/07/guy-codes-own-tetris-program-and-then-cr.php
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