Tetris In 140 Bytes

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Posted by samzenpus on Sunday February 19, 2012 @03:27AM from the a-little-code dept.

mikejuk writes "Is it possible to write a JavaScript program in no more than a tweet's length? A website called 140byt.es says it is and has an implementation of Tetris to prove it. Ok, it only has two types of block — hence its title "Binary Tetris" — and there's no rotate, but it works. The blocks fall down the screen and you steer them into place. You can try it out by playing the demo. Of course the real fun is in figuring out how it works and there is lots of help on the site — so if you're bored how about the 140 character challenge?"

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Nostalgia ... by WrongSizeGlass · 2012-02-19 03:30 · Score: 5, Insightful

It reminds me of the old days when code was efficient and had to fit onto small discs and into limited RAM and/or ROM. The original Mac ROMs were 128k, and all the apps had to run in 128k of RAM. It was amazing what could be done when it just had to fit.
1. Re:Nostalgia ... by arth1 · 2012-02-19 03:51 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  It reminds me of the old days when code was efficient and had to fit onto small discs and into limited RAM and/or ROM. The original Mac ROMs were 128k, and all the apps had to run in 128k of RAM. It was amazing what could be done when it just had to fit.
  Get off my lawn. The ZX-80 and -81 had 1 kB, and there were plenty of games for them. Then there were other computers, all with limited memory.
  I'm sure there are lots of people here except yours truly who have written a variant of SNAKE.
2. Re:Nostalgia ... by peragrin · 2012-02-19 04:07 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  However the code itself is 140 bytes, the number of libraries required to operate it is at 10 gigabytes.
  
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3. Re:Nostalgia ... by thesh0ck · 2012-02-19 05:19 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  The fact is.. only the math is 140bytes. If you view the source and scroll down you see there is way more than that to actually make it work. Including javascript for controlling the game and displaying the blocks. It is in fact 1361 bytes.
4. Re:Nostalgia ... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-19 05:25 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Oh, well, in that case, allow me to introduce you to my 4 character Tetris program.
  
  t();
  
  (That's a function call to an external library that does all the other shit needed)
5. Re:Nostalgia ... by MisterMidi · 2012-02-19 05:33 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  +1 insightful. We could make an entire OS in 140 bytes this way.
6. Re:Nostalgia ... by hal2814 · 2012-02-19 05:35 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  A tweet? I'm not familiar with that metric. Maybe you could convert it to something more standard like Libraries of Congress.
7. Re:Nostalgia ... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-19 05:55 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  The european versions had just 1k (two 2114 chips of 1k x 4 bit)
8. Re:Nostalgia ... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-19 08:13 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  in javascript you don't need to end the last statement on a line with a semicolon, so you could reduce it to t()
9. Re:Nostalgia ... by Dogtanian · 2012-02-19 08:35 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Trust me, 1kB.
  To clarify this, you're right that the original versions of the ZX80 and ZX81 both had 1KB onboard.
  
  However, the US version of the ZX81 (the Timex Sinclair 1000) shipped with 2KB onboard, which is probably what the GP was thinking of.
  
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10. Re:Nostalgia ... by RobertLTux · 2012-02-19 09:28 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  that would be roughly 2.3 lines of a card catalog card (assumes 12 point type and a 3X5 card)
  
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11. Re:Nostalgia ... by hairyfeet · 2012-02-19 10:24 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Wow I thought we VIC-20 owners had it bad with our lousy 5Kb, man just the thought there was somebody out there that could out cheap old Jack Tramiel is kind of mind blowing in and of itself.
  As for TFA just imagine hoe much insane power we would have if they still made OSes and apps like every byte counted. Not to condone piracy or anything but if one were to try out the Tiny series like Tiny XP or Tiny 7 you'd find that with careful stripping one can make a modern Windows that damned near runs on the original WinXP specs and is snappy as hell. MSFT really needs to hire that guy as his Tiny series frankly stomps both the Win Embedded and WinFLP version quite badly. i guess that little hacker knows how to slim down their OS better than they do.
  
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12. Re:Nostalgia ... by Zadaz · 2012-02-19 18:15 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Nibble magazine (an Apple magazine from 1980-1992) had a coding contest every month. The rules: Maximum 2 lines of Apple BASIC. IT was probably my favorite part of the magazine. There were some amazing submissions.
13. Re:Nostalgia ... by arth1 · 2012-02-20 03:13 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  You can still download those.
  There are also annual "one-liner" contests for various languages, which have been around for at least a generation.
  perl is probably the winner in one-liners. Including useful utilities like (all way smaller than 144 bytes):
  perl -00pe0 filename
  ... which will strip all superfluous blank lines from a file, leaving just single blank lines.
  Or, to find all primes between 5000 and 5100:
  seq 5000 5100 | perl -lne 'print if (1x$_) !~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/''
  Or, a simple working web server - actually useful to pull files from one machine to another:
  perl -MIO::All -e 'io(":8080")->fork->accept->(sub {$_[0] < io(-x $1 ? "./$1 |" : $1) if /^GET \/(.*) /})'
  There's also this DOS/Windows gem:
  X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*
  Save it as eicar.com and your antivirus software should pick it up.
  And you can execute it too (it's harmless, of course). A 69 byte binary executable that only contains ASCII characters.
  All in all, the article submission isn't all that impressive.
Read the source code - love the licence.txt by Dark$ide · 2012-02-19 03:33 · Score: 5, Interesting

Take a look at the source code
You'll love the non-restrictive EULA.

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1. Re:Read the source code - love the licence.txt by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-19 03:47 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
  copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
  as the name is changed.
  Why should i have to change the name? I feel that is overly and unnecessarly restrictive.
  I should have the right not to change the name if i don't want to.
  This source code is useless to me.
2. Re:Read the source code - love the licence.txt by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-19 04:23 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  You'll love the non-restrictive EULA.
  It's called WTFPL.
3. Re:Read the source code - love the licence.txt by icebraining · 2012-02-19 07:52 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I'm not sure if it's necessary or not, but in this particular case, it's a Tetris game, not a remote controller for sharks with freakin' lasers.
  
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4. Re:Read the source code - love the licence.txt by roman_mir · 2012-02-19 09:56 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Well, version 2 is 'binary Tetris', so I just assume that version 1 was 'unary Tetris'.
  
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5. Re:Read the source code - love the licence.txt by Datamonstar · 2012-02-19 16:07 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Not gonna read that. I'll just do what the fuck I want to!
  
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  The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Somewhat Misleading by iONiUM · 2012-02-19 03:36 · Score: 5, Informative

Not to diminish their accomplishment, because this is very cool, but the 140 byte implementation is the base logic, it's not the actual printing or keyboard handling. Maybe that's nitpicking, but technically you can't just copy/paste that code and have the game, so I find the summary misleading.
1. Re:Somewhat Misleading by anonymov · 2012-02-19 03:57 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Almost kilobyte? Yep, not very impressive considering what people build in 1 kB of Javascript.
  Not to mention all the cool things people stuff in 512 byte intros for demo parties.
2. Re:Somewhat Misleading by hydrofix · 2012-02-19 04:46 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Here's actually a full Tetris with sound in 1016 characters!
Dear /. Overlords by TubeSteak · 2012-02-19 03:38 · Score: 5, Informative

so if your bored
Dear /. Overlords,
Would it be too much trouble to plug some type of grammar and spelling module into the slash-code?
Not for us, the /. users; for you, the /. editors. I believe that in this wonderful age of computing, we wouldn't
begrudge you guys a little help before you hit "submit."
Sincerely,
You're

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o0t!
1. Re:Dear /. Overlords by Nerdfest · 2012-02-19 03:44 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Your being to picky. People care less about grammar these days ten most other things. Irregardless, there doing the best they can
2. Re:Dear /. Overlords by kelemvor4 · 2012-02-19 09:37 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Your being to picky. People care less about grammar these days ten most other things. Irregardless, there doing the best they can
  Was that as painful for you to write as it was for me to read?
Not 140 bytes by sakdoctor · 2012-02-19 03:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

The function requires an animation loop and event handler otherwise it does nothing. After that, it's way more than 140 bytes.
1. Re:Not 140 bytes by Gavin+Scott · 2012-02-19 04:18 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Yes, it's about 816 characters in total. This is complete fail compared to the kind of stuff that's done for the IOCCC competition. The 140 byte function they wrote implements once tiny part of the whole thing, and looking at it suggests that there really aren't going to be many interesting programs possible in 140 bytes of javascript.
  If you want to see actually impressive tiny programs written in 2K of C code, like the guy who wrote an entire BASIC interpreter one year and then followed it up with a compiler for the same language the next year, then check out the IOCCC sinners page:
  http://www.ioccc.org/years.html
  G.
2. Re:Not 140 bytes by Gavin+Scott · 2012-02-19 04:19 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Was supposed to be "winners" of course, but then "sinners" might well be the more appropriate term anyway...
  G.
Re:It is still requiring a virtual machine. by History's+Coming+To · 2012-02-19 03:48 · Score: 4, Funny

To write that post you had to have a bunch of silicon doped to recreate basic logic gates, a kernal to pass it instructions, an OS to let you interact with the kernal, a browser to connect it to a worldwide network and so on. This is cheating. Real Slashdotters use a butterfly.

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Still not as good as: by lobiusmoop · 2012-02-19 03:49 · Score: 5, Interesting

Chess in 672 bytes

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1. Re:Still not as good as: by pdh11 · 2012-02-19 05:41 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Nor this http://survex.com/~olly/rheolism/: real Tetris in one line of BBC BASIC, 255 bytes after tokenisation. All the shapes are stored in one 32-bit constant. It's just amazing.
  Peter
More! by slasho81 · 2012-02-19 04:04 · Score: 3, Insightful

Now, this is proper Slashdot material. More of this, please!
I have a shorter Tetris implementation by jez9999 · 2012-02-19 05:05 · Score: 4, Funny

Here is my Tetris implementation:

a()

However, it only works on custom Javascript interpreters which have a global a() function that implements a full game of Tetris.

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Geesh... by taoboy · 2012-02-19 05:23 · Score: 4, Informative

#!/usr/bin/perl
use StupidShitIveWritten::Tetris(tetris);
tetris;
Fail - it's actually 845 bytes. by Barbara,+not+Barbie · 2012-02-19 06:48 · Score: 5, Informative

If you actually look at the code, just the javascript is 733 bytes after taking out all whitespece, etc, not 140. And this doesn't count the html that embeds it - an additional 112 bytes, for a total of 845 bytes.

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Re:Obilg Bill Gates (if he ever said it) reference by MobileTatsu-NJG · 2012-02-19 06:51 · Score: 4, Funny

Did you know that the word 'obligatory' came from the Greek God Obligatius who, on occasion, would entertain Zeus with stand-up philosophy? One night he told an off-color joke about Rhea, it made all the gods laugh except for one. Zeus was so angry he punished Obligatius by making him tell the same joke over and over again until he can find somebody who'll laugh at it. To this day, he still wanders the earth saying "640k should be enough for everybody!"

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Re:Binary Tetris by cupantae · 2012-02-19 08:12 · Score: 3, Informative

Binary Tetris is based on dominoes instead of tetrominoes and is called Dis.

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Re:Javascript in 1K by TaoPhoenix · 2012-02-19 08:27 · Score: 3, Interesting

The Chess entry makes a good sobriety test! : )
http://js1k.com/2010-first/demo/750

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Get off my lawn! by billcopc · 2012-02-19 10:35 · Score: 3, Informative

Back in the good ol' days, when men were men, and Java was just a retarded twinkle in Gosling's eye, we had 256-byte competitions in assembly language. Anything using an interpreter is an immediate disqualification, unless your interpreter + script somehow fit inside the 256 byte limit. Basically, any dependency that isn't part of the hardware, BIOS, or low-level OS functionality like disk I/O, must be included in the byte total. Libraries, interpreters, resource blobs, it all adds up.
And now, a real Tetris in 256 bytes: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jchap/tvprotet.htm
Get that goddamned Javascript hack out of my face.

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