Pure Math Grad Colloquium

Jacques van Wyk, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

"Can you win at Tetris?"

Tetris is a classic arcade game in which you race against time to fill rows of a rectangular well with tetrominoes sent to you by the machine. We explore the question of whether or not Tetris can be beaten: provided your reflexes are good enough, is it possible to keep the game going indefinitely, even if the machine is out to get you? For a slightly friendlier variant of Tetris called tetris, we describe winning strategies for some subsets of the tetris pieces, prove some other subsets don’t allow for any, and then outline what can be done in the general case. We might even play a game of Tetris. Or tetris. We’ll see.

MC 5501