There are a lot of talented programmers that devote their efforts to showcasing and taking retro games to new heights, and Tetris is about as iconic as it gets. In a video posted last Summer - that we cam across this week courtesy of Gizmodo - programmer Greg Cannon shared a playthrough of the NES version in which his AI plays so well, and progresses so far, that the game breaks.
Their StackRabbit AI has the sole goal of mastering the game, taking it far beyond what's possible for human players. As explained in the video it still reacts to the game as blocks appear, so is still vulnerable to the random generation being rather cruel, but has all limits removed in terms of its reaction times and input techniques. This takes it well beyond the conventional human limit of level 29, when the sheer speed of the game makes it near-impossible to play.
What's rather fun is that the AI's performance shows the game beyond its intended 'ending', with the originally programmers evidently not preparing for the eventuality of a score this high. As the run goes on (shortened here to 25 minutes from its original runtime of a little over an hour) the game starts to break, with the score tally and other parts of the display falling over. Some funky colour schemes also appear, and eventually the software puts up the white flag and crashes.
A pretty fun watch for the weekend - check it out and let us know what you think!
[source youtube.com, via gizmodo.com]
Comments 32
This is not compelling viewing.
Oddly mesmerising to watch. Love this stuff.
@Lordplops haha I just said the exact opposite. Different strokes I suppose.
Looks like TASBOT has a new Overlord.
Something about watching each new glitch palette come up was strangely thrilling. I love how NES Tetris is still making waves and breaking records in the gaming community over 30 years after its release. Between this and "rolling control" techniques, its a pretty thrilling time for the Tetris scene
@PenultimateOtaku77 Personally, I don't read Gizmodo; so I didn't "cam" across this video this week. I'm disappointed, @PenultimateOtaku77.
The narration is quite engaging!
As the saying goes, "Technology is incredible!"
But does it hypertap?
I don't know why but watching Tetris played with machine precision is strangely calming, like a beautiful piece of visual ASMR. Nice job Mr Cannon.
Tetris being played by machines or TAS runs is quite boring. Removing the human element of it removes the spirit of the game. Some games look more interesting when played by bots, but Tetris needs a human to pit themselves against the RNG to be complete.
Pretty sure I saw an AI bot break Tetris in sometime like 2007. Sometime shortly after youtube was a thing and I had first gotten high speed Internet to be able to participate in it.
This is just incredible. It's really interesting to see how the game starts breaking after a while.
This is Unsane.
The future of speedrunning.
I can't believe I just spent 25 minutes watching a computer play Tetris, but I really enjoyed it! Very interesting moves and I ended up looking forward to the names that he gave the different color schemes. Some of them were quite funny.
so we had humans playing programs, now programs playing programs, next is programs playing humans....... O_o
To think let this game through with an obvious, game-breaking bug. That Seal of Quality means nothing these days, I guess.
Way to go, Skynet!
@Chocobo_Shepherd You mean Facebook?
It's kinda surreal to now see a human commentator making comments about AI playing games.
Anyone know why this version of Tetris is not on the NES online? Like this should be a no brainer for those of us who free based Tetris on the original system
Having seen a few fragments of what human players can achieve in modern Tetris games, this one must really control strikingly sluggishly if the speed at level 29 here is all humans can manage =o
Beyond that, this is really super cool from a hobbyist AI perspective, not only in the elegance of the decision-making algorithms that must be underpinning it, but in the system's ability to either handle the sudden outlandish palette swaps without breaking a sweat, or alternately in its hooks into the native NES code to reconstruct and track the board state that way, depending on the approach the programmer might've taken. Neato!
@BCMT My guess is that Nintendo rather have people play Tetris 99?
Damn! Such a cool video. I always wonder how the original devs would feel seeing their game pushed like this. The death screen was designed to be impossible after all.
@BCMT @NatiaAdamo I think they’d also need to pay a licence fee to the Tetris Company to re-release the NES version too.
Final verdict: only about an hour of gameplay from start to gamebreaking crash. No plot, no online, no variation in objectives, levels are just colour swaps, sound glitches... AI reviews gives this game a 0 out of 10, worst game ever.
@PenultimateOtaku77 It's a common misconception that seasons should be capitalized. After all, days of the week and months of the year are, so it's easy to assume that seasons would be as well. Still, this author has been writing for a long time, probably should've known that.
@gergelyv yep
Why are they playing the inferior version? Tengen Tetris is the best!
@nesrocks Good luck playing it legally in the copyright limbo its in.
@NatiaAdamo I own a 90's pirate multicart from taiwan that has it. But yeah it's not simple otherwise.
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