Thorny AI Problem: TetrisAttack

John Shedletsky · 2004-04-17T16:39:55

This post is about algorithms for programming a computer player for the SNES game Tetris Attack. If you are interested, a good source for info on this game is http://www.tetrisattack.net. For those that don''t know about this game and don''t have the time to investigate, I''ll give a short description of the problem... The game is *kind of* like Tetris. But writing a Tetris AI is easy (http://www.stanford.edu/~jjshed/tetris). This is a much mroe difficult problem. There is a screen of blocks. Blocks can be one of five colors. Blocks are manipulated by swapping them horizontally. When three blocks of the same color are placed next to each other, they disappear. Four or more blocks disappearing at the same time results in bonus points. Now the tricky part: If blocks disappearing cause other blocks to fall and disappear (as a result of landing next to a group of the same-color blocks), this forms a "chain". Good players can create huge chains of blocks causing other blocks to disappear. I have constructed a single-player version of Tetris Attack in C# (http://www.stanford.edu/~jjshed/tetrisattack). I now want to build an AI that can play it. The AI that comes with the SNES game is not very good, and I can easily beat it. I want to write an AI that can chain an entire screen of blocks and otherwise play like a god. I''m not sure how to go about this - I suspect there is no general purpose algorithm that could be applied here. The real problem is figuring out how to let the computer look ahead and figure out what block swaps will result in chains. I''m going to try to invent some kind of pattern matching scheme from scratch, but if someone has any ideas I would love to hear them. PS - My description of the problem is not good, and it''s hard to know what I''m talking about without having played the game. If you have time, look at a screenshot and you should get a good idea from that. ---------------------------------------- Let be be finale of seem, seems to me. ---------------------------------------- Coding: http://www.stanford.edu/~jjshed/coding Miscellany: http://www.stanford.edu/~jjshed

Artificial Intelligence Programming

Started by Telamon April 11, 2004 03:33 AM

10 comments, last by Telamon 20 years ago

the_moo

248

April 15, 2004 08:52 AM

i agree with Kentaro. it seems when the computer plays (watch Bowser on very hard mode) that they get one set to disappear and they find the rest based on a VERY wide search (in Bowsers case anyway). id say thatd be the best way. that way it can be repeated and not be so long...
also whats the highest skill chain anyones ever gotten?
im proud to say i can get a 14-15x skill chain (not often but at least once every time i play). 13x and over comes up with ?x as the chain count!!

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the_moo

Telamon

157

Author

April 17, 2004 04:39 PM

I think 15 is about the limit on the length of a skill chain, since after that you start to run out of blocks. At least, that''s what happens to me.

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Thorny AI Problem: TetrisAttack

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Thorny AI Problem: TetrisAttack

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