Questions
Question: Why are you not telling us the deadline? This seems really obnoxious.
Answer: We did it that way so that everybody will be basically forced to post their best solutions. Everybody will be able to see the current status on the contest status page, and we think this will lead to a more exciting contest.
Question: Your list of legal moves seems to be a set of {shape x rotation x horizontal position}. But in the real game of tetris, one can often "dodge" obstacles by sliding pieces horizontally back and forth as they fall.
Answer: Good point. This was deliberate. We didn't want to have to deal with all the complications of how exactly a piece is moved into place. In fact, different versions of tetris allow different amounts of sliding and rotations at different times.
Question: Is the hangman's paradox parallel in the wording of the secret deadline deliberate? If the secret deadline is in fact 4pm Oct 14, no one will be surprised, because we'd realize that when it's 3:59pm Oct 14 and the deadline still hadn't been announced. But then it can't be 3:59pm Oct 14, either, because if 3:58pm Oct 14 comes around and the deadline still hadn't been announced, we'd realize that it's either 3:59pm Oct 14 or 4pm Oct 14, but the latter can't be the case by the reasoning above. And so on.
Answer: Fortunately, since there are an infinite number of possible stopping times between 4pm Oct 9 and 4pm Oct 14, the paradox doesn't apply.
Question: In the game of Tetris, as I remember it, when a row is deleted, each connected ensemble of pieces above that row would drop as far as they could, not just one row.
Answer: In the versions of tetris we've seen, when a row is completed every row above it drops exactly one square. For example, Nintendo "The New Tetris." We'd be interested to be pointed to a popular version that does not have this behavior.
Question: Do both members of a 2-person team each get a Palm Pilot?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Do you anticipate that the final winner will be determined without the fewest move tie-breaker?
Answer: We don't know.
Question: The main web page says that 21 problems will be posted on 9/25 and another 50 on 10/8. However, there are now 30 on the puzzles page. Are 50 more coming, or just another 31?
Answer: We started with 9 questions. We added 21 on 9/25 to make a total of 30. On 10/8 we will add 50 more to make a total of 80.
Question: Are all the puzzles supposed to be solveable?
Answer: Not necessarily.
Question: To what extent are manual and semi-automated solutions acceptable? If I somehow managed to do all of them by hand, or if my program needs a little help now and then, would that still qualify?
Answer: Manual and semi-automated solutions are acceptable.
Question: If you end up with a tie due to more than one person/team solving all the puzzles with the minimum or equal numbers of moves, how do you intend to decide the winner or will all the tying people/teams win?
Answer: The winning team will be the team that submitted the last of its correct solutions earliest, i.e. the team that finished earliest.
Daniel Sleator Last modified: Thu Oct 5 13:40:20 EDT 2000