Math explains why beating 'Tetris' is basically impossible
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YYou're never going to beat Tetris. Sorry. You might be asking why I'm so pessimistic and even though that's perfectly natural, PBS' Game/Show will back me up here. While the seven multicolored falling bricks (officially called "tetrominoes") all fit together pretty nicely, they only occupy a space that's eight tiles wide when fully combined. Coupled with the size of the playing space -- the "well," as it's called, is ten tiles wide -- there's always going to be room for screw-ups that are out of your control. There's a ton of math, studies of probability and statistics to explain it all, too. As host Jamin Warren tells it (citing a research paper from 1996), failure is due in no small part to how the "bag" randomly generates pieces that're dropping. Over a long enough game, the bag's going to screw you over and drop tetrominoes that make gaps that you won't be able to fill. Specifically, a nasty run of "S...