Tetris is NP-hard even with O (1) Rows or Columns

© 2020 Information Processing Society of Japan. We prove that the classic falling-block video game Tetris (both survival and board clearing) remains NP-complete even when restricted to 8 columns, or to 4 rows, settling open problems posed over 15 years ago. Our reduction is from 3-Partition, similar...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Asif, Sualeh, Coulombe, Michael, Demaine, Erik D, Demaine, Martin L, Hesterberg, Adam, Lynch, Jayson, Singhal, Mihir
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Information Processing Society of Japan 2022
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/143958
Description
Summary:© 2020 Information Processing Society of Japan. We prove that the classic falling-block video game Tetris (both survival and board clearing) remains NP-complete even when restricted to 8 columns, or to 4 rows, settling open problems posed over 15 years ago. Our reduction is from 3-Partition, similar to the previous reduction for unrestricted board sizes, but with a better packing of buckets. On the positive side, we prove that 2-column Tetris (and 1-row Tetris) is polynomial. We also prove that the generalization of Tetris to larger k-omino pieces is NP-complete even when the board starts empty, and even when restricted to 3 columns or 2 rows or constant-size pieces. Finally, we present an animated Tetris font.