New website, but it hardly seems worth a blog post to just mention a new welcome mat. So here’s something that doesn’t really fit into convenient categories. (Lots of things I work on end up in this non-category…)
What is this?
The idea behind of this micro-project comes from the old-fashioned notion of Sunday newspapers with printed chess matches in them. This provided a convenient way for civilized folks to follow and exchange ideas and analysis about very specific details of particular games.
These days (and triply so with Tetris) it’s more likely to be fully electronic, but there’s still a need for an interchangable format, and bonus points for making it human-readable.
Specifically, the goal is not to directly record every player movement (for example, last minute adjustments) although an open-ended comment field allows this level of detail in situations where it’s really needed. In similar fashion, in chess notation, when a player hovers their hand over a piece for a second before deciding to move something else, that normally isn’t notated.
Existing work:
NES Tetris Trainer (StackRabbit API) has in internal notation using JSON like this:
firstPlacement: [0, 2, 19], secondPlacement: [1, -1, 18]The first number is rotation based on the piece’s starting orientation.
The second number is movement (negative=left positive=right) based on the piece’s starting position.
The third number is how far down the piece went, based on it’s starting position.
First and second placement relates to whether it’s taking into account the ‘next’ piece.
This makes it a good format for an AI that analyzes moves by feasibility of playing, but not the most friendly for a human reader.
NES Tetris Trainer (UI) has an interesting notation.
Tu-456
S-67This uses the seven conventional piece names, {IOLJTSZ} and specifies how many columns the piece spans in its landing position (which partially defines the rotation). Columns are labeled left to right starting with 1, and using a 0 to represent column 10.
For example an I piece has only two possible landing positions, a vertical one that spans one column, and a horizontal one that spans 4 columns. Thus there is no ambiguity about rotation. The same goes for S and Z & J and L pieces, which span either 2 or 3 columns depending on rotation. And of course, the O piece effectively doesn’t rotate, and always spans two columns.
For the T, L, and J pieces, there are four possible orientation, and these are denoted with one of {udlr} for up, down, left, right, with the starting position of each piece considered ‘down’. Explained another way, each of these pieces has a short ‘nub‘ that sticks out in the direction indicated. So Tu-456 means the T shape was flipped 180 degrees with the nub “up” and landed across columns 456.
Generally the piece is assumed to have dropped down as far as it can go. Tucks and spins don’t have special notation that I could see, and thus this format is ambiguous, especially if (say) notating a game that had a misdrop, unless specifically annotated.
Tetrisfish
Excellent site. It has puzzles, but they are interactive drag-the-piece-around interfaces, with no user-facing notation that I can spot.
So what’ll it be?
Tetris fandom is, more than most, defined by its awesome community, so I’d leave final decisions to the collective will of the community. But I’d suggest following the Tetris Trainer format for humans, in a list like chess notation, with newlines allowed anywhere for readability. Like chess notation, each move can optionally be notated with ?, ??, !, !!, !?, or ?! with similar meanings. Line clears are denoted as /SINGLE, /DOUBLE, /TRIPLE, /TETRIS, and level changes are optionally marked on their own, = prefixed line. Any commentary can appear in parentheses including the current score.
To avoid the ambiguity in moves like VITS, where I-9 (Vertical I-bar on column 9) could
more than one possible interpretation, an extension to the grammar is that you can
indicate the lowest row that the piece lands on with an @ immediately after the piece.
The bottommost row is 1.
So a VITS might get notated like the following, including a comment
I-9@1 (VITS)But a misdrop, still on column 9, might leave the vertical bar stranded higher up, like
I-9@6??Full Example:
Title: Blue Scuti's famous game
Platform: NES
Date: 2-Jan-2024
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9oVQ43j22g
=Level 19
Lr-12 Tu-345 I-6789 O-23 Jl-89
O-12 Tu-567 Z-345 Jl-78 S-23
O-56 (adjusted) Z-45 O-34 S-89 Tl-45
Tl-90?! Jr-12 O-67/DOUBLE I-6789/SINGLE S-234
Jr-78 (tetris ready!) Ll-56 Jd-789 S-345 Tr-12
Lu-789 Td-123 Lu-678 Tu-567 I-0@1/TETRIS! (score=26800)
...There are probably better places to discuss this; for now I just needed to get it out of my head. 🙂
Check out the GitHub repo with an ANTLR grammar for this format.