How did a 13-year-old achieve the “impossible”?

The ones I played with TetrisYou know what this game can do to your tendons, eyes, mind and sleep.

This phenomenon has taken on such great dimensions that it has been studied by researchers, and this is how it happened Tetris effect.

It is a type of “mental imagery”, also known as “mental rehearsal”.

Like knitting or driving, Tetris “tweaks” the brain's ability to continue processing information even after the task at hand is completed.

They create a mental representation of the game that can be continued, forcing people to see patterns and shapes from Tetris in their environment.

In 2000, research was carried out by neuroscientists Harvardby tracking people playing Tetris, showed that his images are a Different Form memoryWhich is likely related to procedural memory.

Although millions (perhaps billions) of people have been addicted to the cultural phenomenon called Tetris, since 1989 – when an applied mathematics graduate and software engineer from the Moscow Aviation Institute gifted it to the planet, Alexei Pajitnov During the Cold War – until now, no one has ended it.

Pajitnov designed Tetris to never end.

As time passes – and trajectories change – the rate of tetrimenus's fall becomes so rapid that the human eye and mind cannot process it.

Or at least that was the case until he entered the game Willis Gibson.

The player with the handle “Βblue Scuti”, who started playing Tetris at the age of 11, on Wednesday went 3/1 (at the age of 13) against no one has come closer in 34 years: winning the game.

The third-best player in the classic Tetris game, a position he held in the World Championship that ended Wednesday 3/1, reached level 157 in 38 minutes of play. There the computer crashed and the tetriminos stopped falling.

At the same moment, the teenager reported, “I feel like I'm going to pass out. I can't feel my fingers.”

By the way, until a few years ago, players believed that there was no level higher than 29.

How did Gibson finish Tetris?

The only way to finish Tetris is to achieve a score so high that it is able to “overload” the game's memory, to the point where it “stucks” and “crashes”.

That is, whoever beats the game essentially beats the computer, which cannot continue. This has been proven by tests conducted by scientists with the help of artificial intelligence. It was the only one to finish Tetris (in 2021), until Gibson came along.

But how did a 13-year-old overcome the limits of human performance in the digital age?

the Tom StaffordA professor of cognitive science at the University of Sheffield has researched this topic and written a related article It has been published On BBC.

“On 12/21/2023 Gibson played at increasingly frenetic speeds for 40 minutes.

During this time, he set new world records for high scores, levels and fairway “clearances”.

In the end, he was rewarded with the incident that indicated he had achieved the impossible: he was beating the game.

The achievement is real, but its significance extends far beyond the world of classic arcade games and those who love them. What Gibson did, and how he did it, offers general lessons about how people learn and how the boundaries of human performance are stretched.

Many discussions of artificial intelligence focus on areas where human skills may become obsolete.

However, it is a mistake to think that human performance is a fixed goal.

As Gibson's record-breaking achievement showed, we are constantly looking towards outer limits and, in order to reach them, we are expanding our perception.

The point here is that pushing the limits of human ability is the result of continuous collective innovation, as well as outstanding individuals.

Humans are a species defined by our ability to learn. In the digital age, there are more and more possibilities to push into uncharted territories of performance, in all aspects of art, science and culture.

Including Tetris.”