Tetris is Hard, Even to Approximate

In the popular computer game of Tetris, the player is given a sequence of tetromino pieces and must pack them into a rectangular gameboard initially occupied by a given configuration of filled squares; any completely filled row of the gameboard is cleared and all pieces above it drop by one row. We prove that in the offline version of Tetris, it is NP-complete to maximize the number of cleared rows, maximize the number of tetrises (quadruples of rows simultaneously filled and cleared), minimize the maximum height of an occupied square, or maximize the number of pieces placed before the game ends. We furthermore show the extreme inapproximability of the first and last of these objectives to within a factor of p^(1-epsilon), when given a sequence of p pieces, and the inapproximability of the third objective to within a factor of (2 - epsilon), for any epsilon>0. Our results hold under several variations on the rules of Tetris, including different models of rotation, limitations on player agility, and restricted piece sets.Comment: 56 pages, 11 figure

Multi-dimensional Boltzmann Sampling of Languages

This paper addresses the uniform random generation of words from a context-free language (over an alphabet of size $k$), while constraining every letter to a targeted frequency of occurrence. Our approach consists in a multidimensional extension of Boltzmann samplers \cite{Duchon2004}. We show that, under mostly \emph{strong-connectivity} hypotheses, our samplers return a word of size in $[(1-\varepsilon)n, (1+\varepsilon)n]$ and exact frequency in $\mathcal{O}(n^{1+k/2})$ expected time. Moreover, if we accept tolerance intervals of width in $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ for the number of occurrences of each letters, our samplers perform an approximate-size generation of words in expected $\mathcal{O}(n)$ time. We illustrate these techniques on the generation of Tetris tessellations with uniform statistics in the different types of tetraminoes.Comment: 12p

Domains growth and packing properties in driven granular media subject to gravity

We study the dynamical properties of recently introduced frustrated lattice gas models (IFLG and Tetris) for granular media under gentle shaking. We consider both the case where grains have inter-grain surface interactions and the case where they have not, corresponding, for instance, to the presence or absence of moisture in the packs. To characterise the grains packing structure, we discuss the properties of density distribution. In particular, we consider the phenomenon of grains domains formation under compaction. New results amenable of experimental check are discussed along with some important differences between the dynamics of the present models.Comment: 7 pages, 6 postscript files for figure

Bust-a-Move/Puzzle Bobble is NP-Complete

We prove that the classic 1994 Taito video game, known as Puzzle Bobble or Bust-a-Move, is NP-complete. Our proof applies to the perfect-information version where the bubble sequence is known in advance, and it uses just three bubble colors.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures. Corrected mistakes in gadget