Putting the pieces together: Meet Justin Yu ’25, Tetris world champion

https://thetech.com/2024/02/08/justin-yu

by geox • 2 years ago

49 35 2 years ago

tromp• 2 years ago

Justin Yu, Class of 2025

No idea what the 2025 is doing there, or the '25 appended to his name. His Wikipedia entry [1] mentions neither. It does explain how he inspired Blue Scuti to (be the first to) crash the game:

After the 2023 CTWC, Yu announced his intentions to try to "beat the game" by reaching its "killscreen," a point late in the game when the code glitches, resulting in a game crash due to hardware limitations within the NES.
Fellow competitive Tetris player and YouTuber Willis Gibson (known online as "Blue Scuti") became inspired by the goal, and would beat Yu to the achievement on December 21, 2023. Yu celebrated the achievement with Gibson, exclaiming "He did it, he did it!" on his livestream.
On another livestream on January 3, 2024, Yu beat the game, becoming the second person to do so after Gibson and first person to achieve the earliest possible game crash on level 155, two levels quicker than on Gibson's run.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Yu

monkey_monkey• 2 years ago

The 2025 refers to the year he'll graduate - it's fairly common for US college students to classify themselves this way - and this is a college publication he's being profiled on.

jacquesm7• 2 years ago

That seems to be a bit premature, no?

numlocked• 2 years ago

This is the most interesting exchange in my opinion:

Do you think you integrate your Tetris skills into your everyday life?

Tetris has had a major impact on how I think about randomness. For example, it’s very hard for humans to estimate when things will occur, and a big part of that is recognizing that things are actually independent. Like, if there is an event with two outcomes of equal probability and the event has occurred as just one of the outcomes the past ten times, the probability that the next event will have the opposite outcome is still just 50%, not any greater.

xyzelement3• 2 years ago

// Do you think you integrate your Tetris skills into your everyday life

My brother in law and I both noticed we are much better at packing the car than our wives.

Specifically we both constantly rotate what we are loading in to take up all available space whereas our wives just put whatever is at hand next and lose a lot of space between items and thus not using the trunk efficiently.

We both attribute this to us playing lots of Tetris. I am gonna get my kids started on it as soon as they are ready.

I also attribute having played lots of Sokoban to ability to move furniture strategically.

I am sure being intrinsically spacial is required but these games definitely helped develop the skills.

herpdyderp• 2 years ago

Interestingly, I have a similar experience (and not only compared to my spouse), yet I’ve only played Tetris maybe 3 times. People like to quip that I must play a lot of Tetris!

zone411• 2 years ago

There is a well-known male advantage in spatial object rotation. https://books.google.com/books?id=4s5WCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA356#v=on...

HumblyTossed• 2 years ago

Isn’t that post hoc ergo proper hoc fallacy?

CM30• 2 years ago

Isn't this called the Gambler's Fallacy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

Either way, it's interesting he mentions this, since quite a few video games are actively fixing the odds of random events so they do end up working like people might believe under said fallacy. For instance, certain RPGs (like Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft) actually change the odds of getting a rare item if the player fails to get lucky for too long, to the point where eventually they're pretty much guaranteed to get it.

rahimnathwani• 2 years ago

He mentions that Modern Tetris has this: "And in Modern, they have this special randomizer that’s meant to be really fair".

matthewrobertso• 2 years ago

NES Tetris has a weighted randomizer where it is less likely to get the same piece twice in a row (if the same piece is going to be served twice, the second is rerolled one time). So it is possible to get the same piece twice in a row but less likely.

Modern uses random shuffles of the piece order (put all the pieces in a bag and draw random pieces from the bag until the bag is empty).

NoboruWataya• 2 years ago

This is indeed a valuable lesson. But an interesting counterpoint I have heard is that if the event has occurred as just one of the outcomes the past ten times, you need to revisit your assumption that the two outcomes have equal probability. In many real-life scenarios, the probability that the assumption is incorrect may be greater than the probability of such a sequence of outcomes given the assumption. I think I read about this in Taleb's The Black Swan, though I'm sure it's an older idea than that.

VoodooJuJu• 2 years ago

lmao he's wiser than all economists, most academics, and half of HN.

wslh• 2 years ago

What is the official Tetris version for training and competing?

boomboomsubban• 2 years ago

Though there are likely other Tetris competitions, this one is about Tetris on the NES.

tempodox• 2 years ago

Is the backquote before the 25 the Tetris block version of a comma that has yet to fall down?

Putting the pieces together: Meet Justin Yu ’25, Tetris world champion

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