Is Tetris officially one of the hardest problems?
Tetris is hard, even to approximate
Computer scientists proved that playing Tetris perfectly is one of the hardest kinds of problems there is.
The researchers imagined a version of Tetris where you know every falling piece in advance, then asked how hard it is to work out the best possible way to play.
They proved it belongs to a famously tough family of problems called NP-complete, meaning no known shortcut can solve big games quickly. Even getting close to the best score is hard. So if you’re bad at Tetris, maths says that’s fair.
Officially, the long thin piece will never arrive on time.