[tosh]

Related: in the official specification of the game the pieces ("tetrominoes") are drawn from a bag to prevent the possibility of an unfavorable sequence of pieces that force you to lose the game.

IIRC early implementations of the game did not always behave like that.

https://tetris.fandom.com/wiki/Tetris_Guideline

> You might have heard of the result that you can play forever with bag randomizer, Hold and 3 previews (a similar setup even works with 0 previews). However, the opposite is true, if you play with a randomizer that can generate all piece sequences (e.g. memoryless randomizer). In this article we will present a piece sequence that will top you out - no matter what you do.

https://harddrop.com/wiki/A_deadly_piece_sequence

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.55...

[omoikane]

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20872110

"A history of Tetris randomizers (2018)"

[balfirevic]

> IIRC early implementations of the game did not always behave like that.

And they were also much better for it, in my opinion (and that of many classic NES Tetris fans).

[samatman]

This is the perfect illustration of the gambler's it-isn't-necessarily-a-fallacy!

Despite a uniform distribution of tetrominoes, if you haven't seen that all important I in awhile, the run is "cold" and you are in fact "due".

For the gambler's fallacy to apply, events have to be both random and uncorrelated, where most interesting real-life situations (i.e. not games) the degree of correlation between events isn't zero: that's one way to observe a normal distribution, but not even the usual one.

[tedunangst]

https://simon.lc/the-history-of-tetris-randomizers

[hackernewds]

A great idea and article needing some LaTex formatting