Very cool! I am a good Tetris player (in the top 10% of players) and wanted to give brick yeeting against an LLM a spin.
Some feedback:
- Knowing the scoring system is helpful when going 1v1 high score
- Use a different randomization system, I kept getting starved for pieces like I. True random is fine, throwing a copy of every piece into a bag and then drawing them one by one is better (7 bag), nearly random with some lookbehind to prevent getting a string of ZSZS is solid, too (TGM randomizer)
- Clockwise and counter-clockwise rotation is important for human players, we can only hit so many keys per second
- re-mappable keys are also appreciated
Nice work, I'm going to keep watching.
vunderba 28 minutes ago [-]
I actually grew up playing the Spectrum HoloByte version of Tetris for PC, which only lets you rotate in one direction. As a result, I ended up playing NES Tetris for years as a kid before realizing it lets you rotate clockwise / counterclockwise!
The worst thing is that the delayed auto shift is slightly off and it messes my finesse. (I used to play competitive tetris as well, but between getting older -> worse reflexes and vision problems I can't really play anymore. Weirdly, finesse muscle memory is still working.)
I don't think the goal is to make a PvP simulator, it would be too easy to cheese or do weird strategies. It's mostly for LLMs to play.
bubblesorting 33 minutes ago [-]
Hello fellow Tetris nerd with a -sort username :)
On the topic of reflexes decaying (I'm getting there, in my late 30s): Have you played Stackflow? It's a number go up roguelite disguised as an arcade brick stacking game, but the gravity is low enough that it is effectively turn based. More about 'deck' building, less about chaining PCs and C-Spins.
vunderba 24 minutes ago [-]
Interesting but frustratingly vague on details. How exactly are the models playing? Is it using some kind of PGN equivalent in Tetris that represents a on-going game, passing an ASCII representation, encoding as a JSON structure, or just directly sending screenshots of the game to the various LLMs?
tiahura 28 seconds ago [-]
I'd like to see a nethackbench.
OGEnthusiast 1 hours ago [-]
Gemini 3 Flash is at a very nice point along the price-performance curve. A good workhorse model, while supplementing it with Opus 4.5 / Gemini 3 Pro for more complex tasks.
burkaman 1 hours ago [-]
It's actually 80% against Opus, 66% average against the 5 models it's tested with.
esafak 44 minutes ago [-]
I imagine this is because Tetris is visual and the Gemini models are strong visually.
bogtog 27 minutes ago [-]
I figure OP would try and give the models pure text forms of the game?
.....
l....
l....
l.ttt
l..t.
akomtu 1 hours ago [-]
It would be more interesting to make it build a chess engine and compare it against Stockfish. The chess engine should be a standalone no-dependencies C/C++ program that fits in NNN lines of code.
gpm 21 minutes ago [-]
Comparing against stockfish isn't fair. That's comparing against enormous amounts of compute spent experimenting with strategies, training neutral nets, etc.
It will lose so badly there will be no point in the comparison.
Besides you could compare models (and harnesses) directly against eachother.
arendtio 1 hours ago [-]
There are some concepts clashing here.
I mean, if you let the LLM build a testris bot, it would be 1000x better than what the LLMs are doing. So yes, it is fun to win against an AI, but to be fair against such processing power, you should not be able to win. It is only possible because LLMs are not built for such tasks.
i_cannot_hack 12 minutes ago [-]
Fun fact: Humans were not build for playing Tetris either!
Rendered at 21:17:04 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Some feedback: - Knowing the scoring system is helpful when going 1v1 high score
- Use a different randomization system, I kept getting starved for pieces like I. True random is fine, throwing a copy of every piece into a bag and then drawing them one by one is better (7 bag), nearly random with some lookbehind to prevent getting a string of ZSZS is solid, too (TGM randomizer)
- Piece rotation feels left-biased, and keeps making me mis-drop, like the T pieces shift to the left if you spin 4 times. Check out https://tetris.wiki/images/thumb/3/3d/SRS-pieces.png/300px-S... or https://tetris.wiki/images/b/b5/Tgm_basic_ars_description.pn... for examples of how other games are doing it.
- Clockwise and counter-clockwise rotation is important for human players, we can only hit so many keys per second
- re-mappable keys are also appreciated
Nice work, I'm going to keep watching.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_(Spectrum_HoloByte)
I don't think the goal is to make a PvP simulator, it would be too easy to cheese or do weird strategies. It's mostly for LLMs to play.
On the topic of reflexes decaying (I'm getting there, in my late 30s): Have you played Stackflow? It's a number go up roguelite disguised as an arcade brick stacking game, but the gravity is low enough that it is effectively turn based. More about 'deck' building, less about chaining PCs and C-Spins.
.....
l....
l....
l.ttt
l..t.
It will lose so badly there will be no point in the comparison.
Besides you could compare models (and harnesses) directly against eachother.
I mean, if you let the LLM build a testris bot, it would be 1000x better than what the LLMs are doing. So yes, it is fun to win against an AI, but to be fair against such processing power, you should not be able to win. It is only possible because LLMs are not built for such tasks.