TETRIS, THE GAME DESIGNED IN THE SOVIET UNION

Claire Fontaine is playing Tetris at home

Today, The Grandma has gone to visit Claire Fontaine who is totally in love with her new Tetris Machine.

The Grandma has wanted to play a little with Claire's new acquisition and they have spent a wonderful day playing Tetris again and again without stopping.

Tetris, in Russian Тетрис, is a tile-matching puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Soviet Russian game designer Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov, in Russian Алексе́й Леони́дович Па́житнов. The first playable version was completed on June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the Soviet Union in Moscow.

He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix tetra-, all of the game's pieces contain four segments and tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport. The name is also used in-game to refer to the play where four lines, the maximum simultaneous clearance number, are cleared at once.

Tetris was the first entertainment software to be exported from the Soviet Union to the United States, where it was published by Spectrum HoloByte for the Commodore 64 and IBM PC. The game is a popular use of tetrominoes, the four-element case of polyominoes, which have been used in popular puzzles since at least 1907. The name for these figures was given by the mathematician Solomon W. Golomb in 1953.

Tetris by Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov

The game, or one of its many variants, is available for nearly every video game console and computer operating system, as well as on devices such as graphing calculators, mobile phones, portable media players, PDAs, Network music players, and as an Easter egg on non-media products like oscilloscopes. It has inspired Tetris serving dishes, and it has even been played on the sides of various buildings.

While versions of Tetris were sold for a range of 1980s home computer platforms as well as arcades, it was the successful handheld version for the Game Boy, launched in 1989, that established the game as one of the most popular video games ever. Electronic Gaming Monthly's 100th issue had Tetris in first place as Greatest Game of All Time.

Tetriminos are game pieces shaped like tetrominoes, geometric shapes composed of four square blocks each. A random sequence of Tetriminos fall down the playing field, a rectangular vertical shaft, called the well or matrix. 

The objective of the game is to manipulate these Tetriminos, by moving each one sideways and/or rotating by quarter-turns, so that they form a solid horizontal line without gaps. When such a line is formed, it disappears and any blocks above it fall down to fill the space. When a certain number of lines are cleared, the game enters a new level. As the game progresses, each level causes the Tetriminos to fall faster, and the game ends when the stack of Tetriminos reaches the top of the playing field and no new Tetriminos are able to enter. Some games also end after a finite number of levels or lines.

More information: Tetris

All of the Tetriminos can fill and clear both singles and doubles. I, J, and L are able to clear triples. Only the I Tetrimino has the capacity to clear four lines simultaneously, and this is referred to as a tetris. This may vary depending on the rotation and compensation rules of each specific Tetris implementation. For instance, in the Super Rotation System used in most recent implementations, certain situations allow T, S, and Z to 'snap' into tight spots and clear triples.

Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov

Pajitnov's original version for the Electronika 60 computer used green brackets to represent blocks. Versions of Tetris on the original Game Boy/Game Boy Color and on most dedicated handheld games use monochrome or grayscale graphics, but most popular versions use a separate color for each distinct shape.

Prior to The Tetris Company's standardization in the early 2000s, those colors varied widely from implementation to implementation.

The scoring formula for the majority of Tetris products is built on the idea that more difficult line clears should be awarded more points. For example, a single line clear in Tetris Zone is worth 100 points, clearing four lines at once, known as a Tetris, is worth 800, while each subsequent back-to-back Tetris is worth 1,200.

In conjunction, players can be awarded combos that exist in certain games which reward multiple line clears in quick succession. The exact conditions for triggering combos, and the amount of importance assigned to them, vary from game to game.

More information: Live Science

Tetris was created in June 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, an artificial intelligence researcher working for the Soviet Academy of Sciences at Computer Center in Moscow.

Tasked with testing the capabilities of new hardware, Pajitnov would do so by writing simple games for them. He initially considered creating a game around pentominoes, which featured in puzzle games that he had enjoyed as a child, but felt that it might have been too complicated with twelve different shape variations, so the concept switched to tetrominoes, of which there are seven variants.

The Electronika 60 on which he was working had only a text-based display, so the tetrominoes were formed of letter characters. Realizing that completed lines resulted in the screen filling up quickly, Pajitnov decided to delete them, creating a key part of Tetris gameplay.

Tetris by Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov

Pajitnov's game proved popular with his colleagues. Academy of Sciences co-workers Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov ported the game to the IBM PC.

Gerasimov reports that Pajitnov chose the name Tetris as a combination of tetromino and tennis. From there, the PC game became popular and began spreading around Moscow. Gerasimov removed his 1988 version of the game from his website in October 2003, in response to a demand from counsel for The Tetris Company. He resumed making it available in August 2006.

The PC version made its way to Budapest, Hungary, where it was ported to various platforms and was discovered by British software house Andromeda. They attempted to contact Pajitnov to secure the rights for the PC version, but before the deal was firmly settled, they had already sold the rights to Spectrum HoloByte. After failing to settle the deal with Pajitnov, Andromeda attempted to license it from the Hungarian programmers instead.

Meanwhile, before any legal rights were settled, the Spectrum HoloByte IBM PC version of Tetris, which contained background graphics featuring Russian scenes, was released in the United States in 1987. The game's popularity was tremendous; Computer Gaming World called the game deceptively simple and insidiously addictive.

More information: Den of Geek

The details of the licensing issues were uncertain by this point, but in 1987 Andromeda managed to obtain copyright licensing for the IBM PC and any other home computer system. Their Commodore 64 release in 1988 has a 26-minute soundtrack composed by game musician Wally Beben.

In 1996, the rights to the game reverted from the Russian state to Pajitnov himself, who previously had made very little money from the game. That year, The Tetris Company was founded, claiming to hold copyright registrations for Tetris products in the U.S. and taking out trademark registrations for Tetris in almost every country in the world.

Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov

Players lose a typical game of Tetris when they can no longer keep up with the increasing speed, or when the player can not find an appropriate solution to the Tetriminos they've been given, and the Tetriminos stack up to the top of the playing field. This is commonly referred to as topping out.

In computer science, it is common to analyze the computational complexity of problems, including real life problems and games. It was proven that for the offline version of Tetris, the player knows the complete sequence of pieces that will be dropped, i.e. there is no hidden information, the following objectives are NP-complete:

-Maximizing the number of rows cleared while playing the given piece sequence

-Maximizing the number of pieces placed before a loss occurs

-Maximizing the number of simultaneous clearing of four rows

-Minimizing the height of the highest filled grid square over the course of the sequence

Also, it is difficult to even approximately solve the first, second, and fourth problem. It is NP-hard, given an initial gameboard and a sequence of p pieces, to approximate the first two problems to within a factor of p1−ε for any constant ε>0. It is NP-hard to approximate the last problem within a factor of 2−ε for any constant ε>0.

To prove NP-completeness, it was shown that there is a polynomial reduction between the 3-partition problem, which is also NP-complete, and the Tetris problem.

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According to research Tetris activity can also lead to more efficient brain activity during play. When first playing Tetris, brain function and activity increases, along with greater cerebral energy consumption, measured by glucose metabolic rate.

Scientists say that Tetris helps brain activity

As Tetris players become more proficient, their brains show a reduced consumption of glucose, indicating more efficient brain activity for this task.

Moderate play of Tetris, half-an-hour a day for three months, boosts general cognitive functions such as critical thinking, reasoning, language and processing and increases cerebral cortex thickness.

In January 2009, an Oxford University research group reported in PLoS ONE that for healthy volunteers, playing Tetris soon after viewing traumatic material in the laboratory reduced the number of flashbacks to those scenes in the following week. They believe that the computer game may disrupt the memories that are retained of the sights and sounds witnessed at the time, and which are later re-experienced through involuntary, distressing flashbacks of that moment. 

The group hopes to develop this approach further as a potential intervention to reduce the flashbacks experienced in post-traumatic stress disorder but emphasized that these are only preliminary results.

A study of Plymouth University's Cognition Institute shows that playing Tetris could give a quick and manageable fix for people struggling to stick to diets, or quit smoking or drinking.

Another notable effect is that, according to a Canadian study in April 2013, playing Tetris has been found to treat older adolescents with amblyopia, lazy eye, which was better than patching a victim's well eye to train their weaker eye.

The game has been noted to cause the brain to involuntarily picture Tetris combinations even when the player is not playing, the Tetris effect, although this can occur with any computer game or situation showcasing repeated images or scenarios, such as a jigsaw puzzle. 

While debates about Tetris's cognitive benefits continue, at least some researchers view it as a milestone in the gamification of education.

More information: Make Use Of

Tetris came along early and had a very important role 

in breaking down ordinary people's inhibitions in front of computers,

which were scary objects to non-professionals used to pen and paper. 

But the fact that something so simple and beautiful

could appear on screen destroyed that barrier.

 Alexey Pajitnov