Local team wins all-state science competition

Rollie is 12 years old and at the science fair, describing how he wrote a computer program to play tetris to a local TV news station that came looking for an easy filler piece.

It turns out Rollie is kind of an unusually bright kid. But he's also very shy. Fortunately his math teacher, George Gonzalez, saw his potential.

Rollie insists his two friends, Steve and Ivan, are also co-authors of his game. They maybe don't write the code, but their ideas for improvements are what made it so special.

Rollie says something like, "they're my friends, and I like that they like my game, because when I started here, I didn't know anybody and I felt sad."

The TV reporter asks Rollie to explain how the game works.

"Well, I love tetris. But sooner or later, the tetris blocks fall so fast that it is impossible to get them in the right spot.

"I wondered if a program that could play as fast as the game would ever lose, so that's what I worked on first. My teacher, Mr Gonzalez, let me come into the computer lab after school and on the weekends so that I could work on it.

"The hardest part was teaching the program where to put the blocks. So, I made a way for the program to just watch me play, and learn what I did. Then I didn't have to explain it all in the language that the computer understands, because you can imagine how much extra work that would be, right?"

And then Rollie starts laughing, and the TV reporter laughs along with him, despite having no idea.

Rollie continues. "I wrote a subrouting that takes two input parameters: the name of the tetromino that's falling down, and then also, the shape at the bottom of the screen. Ivan called it the skyline, so that's what I call it too."

"And then the program just waits for a new tetromino to show up, and then it looks up what I told it to do in this situation. As the game speeds up, it doesn't matter, because the program can go just as fast. The program doesn't have clumsy human fingers and bad human eyesight, so it never gets overwhelmed.

"Does the program ever lose?"

"Yes!" Steve interjected. "It's because the game cheats! It gives you impossible problems!"

Again Rollie starts laughing, and snorts in a weird way. "Isn't that funny? The game cheats! It's not fair! It gives you tetrominoes that eventually always lead to build up across the bottom, so even a computer program that plays as fast as the game sooner or later will fail. It made me really angry when I first found this out. For a long time I tried to make my program better, but I can't fix that part."

George Gonzalez, Rollie's math teacher, answers a few questions from the reporter.

"Rollie is a very bright student. When he started here, I asked Steve and Ivan to be his computer lab partners, and I'm very proud of how the three of them have become such a team."

Back to Rollie: "The game works like tetris in that you try to keep going as long as you can. But players cooperate. And tetris only has a few blocks, and each only is made of like five cells at most. The blocks here are mostly always one of a set, but each time you play the game mutates the block shapes randomly, and if a new shape causes some major clear, then it shows up more.

"In other words, if the game detects that certain new pieces cause big dramatic changes, then it tries to use those but only sparingly.

"Games aren't fun if they are too easy or too hard."

Steve interjects. "And also, games need to change over time. Levels need something new about them."

"The game adapts to how you play it. Like if the game realizes that every time it gives you a certain shape, you use that shape to pull off a multi-line clear, it won't give you that shape very often."

"And also, well, this game is in 3d, so, instead of looking at the stacking blocks from the side, you're looking at it sort of like you're looking down into a paper sack at the grocery store, and you're trying to store the most groceries in there."