The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'tetris'
2009/6/6
Today's Google title graphic:
Apparently today is the 25th anniversary of the invention of Tetris, perhaps one of the most concise (not to mention enjoyable) statements of existentialism embodied in interactive form. (In Tetris, there are no goals, no new worlds to explore, foes to vanquish, princesses to rescue or other paraphernalia, just the ceaseless, Sisyphean struggle against an inexorable, impersonally hostile universe, from which the only respite is your inevitable death.) Tetris also gave its name to a hallucinatory condition often triggered by playing it for a prolonged period.
Perhaps coincidentally, one of the inventors of Tetris now lives in Sydney and works at Google, and is involved in the Google Wave project.
2002/10/27
Computer scientists at MIT prove that Tetris is NP-hard; i.e., optimally stacking blocks is in the same class of problems as things like the Travelling Salesman problem, meaning that there is no known way to solve them efficiently. Maybe this means that we'll soon see Tetris-based cryptographic algorithms?