The Computer Tutor Blog

After making Snake, I decided to go for a more complicated arcade classic: Tetris.

Style-wise, it’s the same box-shadow heavy aesthetic you’ve seen before. And logic-wise, it’s fairly simple: a large grid whose squares are lit up different colors as a setInterval() moves “blocks” down the coordinate system.

So let’s talk about player inputs. You’ll notice some <button>s on the side of the screen, laid out like an arrow pad.

As it turns out, both clicks and keydowns will trigger the action.

I used standard arrow symbols (whose HTML encoding I found here) to avoid loading in a library, and to reinforce the fact that you can also use your arrow keys for this.

Maybe I should break out Snake again - and make it so you can play on mobile, with similar onscreen controls. Hm…

tl;dr: give users multiple input options; use simple symbolism to reinforce functionality; Tetris is great precisely because it is simple to play

Look how talented he is!!

It From Bit: Is The Universe A Cellular Automaton?

“I don’t believe that there are objects like electrons and photons, and things which are themselves and nothing else. What I believe is that there’s an information process, and the bits, when they’re in certain configurations, behave like the thing we call the electron, or the hydrogen atom, or whatever.”

In the mid-20th century, computers allowed us to explore a brand new idea: that a discrete space, with a simple set of rules and straightforward initial conditions, could evolve in steps to create a rich, life-like environment. While many of us have played or seen simulations of Conway’s Game of Life, a deeper idea is at the core of such a simulation: that at a fundamental level, the Universe itself may be nothing more than a similar cellular automaton. Started by Ed Fredkin in the 1960s, a simple idea that digital information could represent reality, and that bits of that information in different states and configurations could correspond to what we perceive as different particles in our physical Universe. Developed further by John Wheeler and David Bekenstein, and later taken to a quantum level to incorporate the full nature of the Universe, it’s conceivable that both matter and energy could be illusions. If the “It from Bit” hypothesis is true, only digital information would truly be real.

The patent that started it all.