Guus Bosman

I found this interesting article on Slashdot today. Three mathematicians at MIT proved that Tetris is NP-complete to solve. That is: if you know in advance the exact order the pieces will fall, it is NP-complete (ie: there is no smart algorithm for it) to maximize your score. The original article is here, it's quite readable for non-mathematicians too.

In the past similar results have been established for other games (for example Minesweeper). Pacman however, has 1 perfect solution (to eat every dot, every energizer, every blue man and every fruit up to and including board 256 will give you a total of 3,333,360 points).