MIT Completes "Holy Grail of Hacks," Turns Green Building into a Game of Tetris

I was part of the team that worked on this way back in the day, and it was a blast. It was a bunch of soldering, running wires, trying to debug all the issues, etc. And then everything came together and it just worked.

Woz showing up was the icing on the cake, and it was definitely one of the highlights of my college career.

bhickey• 14 years ago

I was a middle-schooler and my parents took me to play. I recall a bug where if you rotated the square quickly enough it would travel upward. Someone (maybe Clara?) whipped out a patch and recompiled.

mkramlich• 14 years ago

I can imagine Woz sitting there thinking, "I can do this in 2 chips, 8 transistors and ..."

gsiener• 14 years ago

Thanks, I was about to post this (my friend's laptop is the one they used for the controls). Go Brown!

speleding• 14 years ago

And it was done before that in 1995 at Delft University, as the article mentions. (I saw it there!). Playing Angry Birds on the side of a building would be more with the time.

ilamont• 14 years ago

MIT Hack page, with photos:

http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2012/tetris/

soup10• 14 years ago

Is there any video of this? The colored lighting is really cool.

kmccarth• 14 years ago

yup, just found it on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAIPUGO1iko

fridek• 14 years ago

Polish students show such demo every year on their P.I.W.O. display. It has a 10x12 resolution and supports 4 colours using 8 light bulbs in every window. There is also animation editor available for download and an ongoing contest for the best animation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoFdS5lWXg8

http://www.piwo.pwr.wroc.pl/?lang=en

Dove• 14 years ago

That's very cool and playful, but "Holy grail of hacks" seems a bit overwrought. I don't want to be a naysaying jerk, and the whole thing is cool, but . . . is this harder than it looks?

grinich• 14 years ago

Yes.

dmcgregor• 14 years ago

haha, great response. This whole dialogue reminds me of a Louis CK line: "Everything is amazing, and no one is happy."

chimeracoder• 14 years ago

Could you explain? I've seen MIT do similar 'hacks' in the past with various patterns in the windows ('SOX' for the 2004 World Series is the only one I remember off the top of my head). Nothing was this elaborate, but I imagine that the hard part is actually setting up the system to coordinate the actual lights turning off/on.... and it seems like they've had that for a while.

nickm122• 14 years ago

I was a student at MIT in the early 90s and Tetris on the Green Building was considered the "holy grail of hacks" back then. Definitely a major accomplishment, particularly with color and also lots of props to Brown for getting there first!

arbitrarywords• 14 years ago

I still don't quite get it. Presumably the story is more interesting than "we got permission and used lots of wire", but the first couple of pages of google results don't really explain how.

lovelyworld• 14 years ago

I've seen one of the modules. There seems to be wirelessly controlled custom PCBs in each window.

mturmon2• 14 years ago

The Caltech Rose Bowl prank of 1984 seems much harder and had a greater audience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rose_Bowl#Scoreboard_prank

They had to break in to the Rose Bowl stadium, design and build special boards to take over the scoreboard lights, and break back in to install the boards. The control of the board during the halftime break in the Rose Bowl game was done by RF link. This was in 1984, when hardware was much more finicky and expensive.

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/04/sports/sports-people-prank...

haberman• 14 years ago

Or the 1961 Great Rose Bowl Hoax that inspired it, which might not be as high-tech, but is to me even more satisfying because they tricked an entire crowd of UW fans into unwittingly cheering for their nerdy and ignored school.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Rose_Bowl_Hoax

They even made the first few compromised banners subtle enough that the crowd kept going with it until the finale where they wrote "CALTECH," an unmistakable prank.

ryanwjackson• 14 years ago

Certainly not the first time students have hacked the Green Building's lights (i.e. http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2011/flag_on_9_11/).

dlaw2• 14 years ago

The 9/11 hack was the first test of the same lights used for Tetris.

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

Were the building administrators in on this? Or was it really a "hack"?

I'm assuming there must be some central computer controlling the lights, either than or they attached something to / modified each light switch?

dlaw2• 14 years ago

The lights in the windows are custom fabbed PCBs, completely independent of the building lights.

tedmiston• 14 years ago

Can someone explain how the system communicates from a high level?

simonw• 14 years ago

I can't find anywhere that details if this hack was done with permission from the various occupants of the building. If they had to break in to every office on that side of the building to install the equipment the hack becomes even more impressive.

shangaslammi• 14 years ago

Looks similar to the "Mikontalo Lights" project in Finland. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ril6OYSKD3A

aestetix• 14 years ago

Naturally I gotta plug the CCC's Project Blinkenlights: http://blinkenlights.net/

Tloewald2• 14 years ago

The player in the video is frustratingly awful.

MIT Completes "Holy Grail of Hacks," Turns Green Building into a Game of Tetris

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