a month ago
- The Antithesis team aimed to 'beat' Tetris by reaching 'rebirth' (level counter rolling over from 255 to 0), a goal inspired by teenage gamers who had surpassed traditional human limits.
- They used a fuzzing approach with random inputs, game state snapshots, and an objective function to guide exploration, evolving tactics to mimic human strategies like Tetris readiness for four-line clears.
- A critical bug in the line count calculation (misinterpreting BCD) caused a stall at level 160, which was fixed by correcting the code, allowing them to achieve rebirth and match human records.
- Along the way, they encountered various glitches in deep levels, such as color palette issues, freezes, and unusual bugs like the 'FBFBFB' score glitch, highlighting software's unpredictable corners.
- The project demonstrates how automated testing (like Antithesis) can explore edge cases in software, using survival-of-the-fittest strategies to uncover bugs and achieve complex goals.