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Getting the World Record in Hatetris (2022)

HATETRIS is the world's hardest version of Tetris; it's Tetris that hates you. In this post, we chronicle our eleven-month journey to get the world record, and some of our wrong turns along the way.

We breathed a slow sigh of relief as weeks went by and our own project made progress with no new world records being set, until knewjade in late August of 2021 posted a high score completely unlike any game known to exist for HATETRIS, totalling 66 points. Instead of watching it tick agonizingly forward, at around the 48 hour mark, when we were starting to see scores of around 63, we decided we’d cheat - we’d take one well, printed out with the output logs, and run a small 10k beam search on a laptop in order to get a lower bound for how good a game was possible. If you read this far, (which is, lets face it, unlikely) you’ve heard a lot of griping, seen some things that look semi-magical, and possibly left with the impression that the authors had some sort of incredible knowledge base, or are researchers deeply entwined with the topic.

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