My quest to see all of Tetris

4 days 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.

Hasty Briefsbeta