AI BREAKS NES TETRIS! - 102 MILLION and level 237

all right welcome back to another stackrabbit video if this is your first time here stackrabbit is an nes tetris ai that i've been working really hard on and i'm super excited to show off what it can do when it has no limits in the previous video we saw what it can do when it has realistic human limitations but today we're going to see it go all out it's going to be doing 30 hertz tapping which is as fast as you can do inputs with how the game works and it also has no reaction time limitations it's going to act as soon as it sees information on screen so it has started on level 19 here for maximum scoring potential and it is going to try and clear only tetrises and no line clears other than tetrises that will maximize its score since tetris has scored far more points than any other line clears and so far it's doing a pretty good job of that of course it's always susceptible to the randomness of the game which can push it into really tough scenarios sometimes but it tries to maintain an accommodating stack to minimize the effect rng has on its performance later on we'll see the pace of the game change as the speed doubles at level 29. humans have dubbed this the kill screen because it's extremely difficult for humans to play at that speed but with no limitations stat rabbit is going to thrive and we're going to see it push the limits of this game um so stay on the lookout for that when that comes later on but for now it is playing perfect it has cleared now 10 tetrises in a row with no burned lines so it is this is this is as close as we can get to tetris perfection it will not miss drop it will not uh it will not have any unforeseen errors it plans everything out and for example you saw there it put the l for the long bar immediately it didn't even have to like put it somewhere else and adjust it and that's because while the piece is loading in it pre-plans where it's going to put it for all seven possible things it could see in the next box so if it sees a square in the next block it's like okay well if it's a square into s i'll put it here if it's a square into t i'll put it here and so on and then as soon as the first frame where it shows in the next box it just starts moving it to the right spot so um some of the highlights of the human possible video were the crazy adjustments it's doing and it's still doing those it just does them instantly it's default placement is the optimal adjustment and look at that it is 68 lines in and has not burned a single line it has gotten all tetrises for 72 lines it's going to push the limits oh that was so sneaky and you saw it actually passed on a tetris there but if it hadn't done that it would not have had a spot for the next piece so in very rare scenarios it will pass on a tetris but generally it's just it's just going all out there's it's at all stops just to get tetrises oh and the the stuff it finds is so cool i it really blows my mind to this day so we're we're approaching 100 lines and it still has not burned anything [Music] i've put some of its other achievements on screen so the the top achievement was what we saw in the last video the human possible 1.5 million um but the other one the second one is the no limits achievement so the 1.5 million into level 29 means from the start of the game till the end it only burned like less than five lines and it got into kill screen with 1.5 million where the maximum possible score like a perfect game would be 1.54 and that is far and away the most impressive thing we've seen into killscreen so far but it is 108 lines in and it has not burned a single line and it gets another tetris it's at 112 lines it has gotten perfect transitions before we'll see if it can get another one right now but there's so much rng if it doesn't get the longer and look at that it's not getting the long bar no matter how perfectly you play you need the long bar so it's gonna burn a few lines there it does a beautiful five and below is what that placement is called he's gonna get another tetris and it unfortunately does have to burn again and some less than ideal pieces means it's gonna have to dig out here but that was a heck of a run you've gotta give it all the credit in the world for getting to what was it like 112 lines perfect you'd love to see it and now it's um past 130 lines is typically where you would transition from 18 to 19 but we started on 19 so we wait until the level 20 transition and now every 10 lines the level is going to go up and it's not going to stop when we hit 29 it's going to keep going up [Music] i just had a measly 800k into level 20. so still still a phenomenal game and so it's just chilling it's doing some great stacking and it has not a care in the world what's really cool is that the way stackrab has been developed it will adapt its play based on how fast it can tap and where it can get the pieces so when it has human limitations it gets scared about halfway up the board and here it still gets scared but it gets scared only once it gets to the limits of where it can get pieces and i don't have to change any any specific stuff about where it should be building it just figures all that out all out it figures that all out based on where it can tap so right now it's not got a super ideal stack but it's managing and get some good pieces so now it's gotten its stacked back together one interesting thing about playing when you have almost no burns is that if your stack gets disconnected there's not really many ways to fix it you just kind of have to get the pieces that fit there you can't do any fancy burn techniques to reconnect your stack but it has uh it has gotten everything back under control it's at 1.1 million on level 24 which is absolutely ridiculous um i think the the best the best human game is like a max out into 24 i think maybe someone has a max out on level 23 but still absolutely ridiculous a 1.16 into level 25 almost a 1.2 on 25 absolute ridiculousness [Music] and so we're approaching level 29 which is still called the kill screen even though there are starting to be players who can play pretty deep into the kill screen but it's gonna double the speed of the game and even for a 30 hertz ai it is going to have limitations on where it can put the pieces so it can get about halfway up the board on the left side and like maybe three quarters the way up on the right side and it will be able to do pretty fine with that but it is still a significant limit limitation so it will start to be more scared but for right now it has no fear it is trying to get only tetrises and it's ready for another one there we go into level 28 it's gotten it has nine more lines until kill screen it's trying to make the best out of them but this is a terrible stack and it makes some weird shapes and it's not scared of doing funky stuff up here this would be absolute suicide for any human but it is just chilling it is doing bizarre stuff and it knows it's gonna be okay it goes into kill screen with a 1.43 and digs digs perfectly fine out of that disastrous board up at the top it just brushes it off it's like wait was i supposed to be scared of that of course as you can see it still is much more willing to burn on kill screen speed than it was on 19 and that's just because things are faster and more volatile and since it is trying to go deeper into the later levels it can't really risk having a top out and having to redo all of it so it's just playing safer and getting as many tetris as it can but not getting up too high to risk topping out although as you can see on the screen its previous best is 47 million which is an absolutely ludicrous score but it's already playing more efficient than that just from all the improvements that have happened over the past few months and just it's generally gotten better at stacking so even as it goes for ridiculous scores it's cool to see but it's still getting better so we've gone a few levels in the kill screen we're now at level 33 and now it's got a bit of a weird board but get some all right pieces and it's just gonna stack on top and it'll get to this hole when it gets to it there we go now it's got the opportunity and it has cleaned things out so we're on level 35 which is still within the realm of what humans have done at the time recording this video the human level pb is level 41 so it still actually has a ways before it beats the best that humans have done and i think that's just a testament to human achievement because surviving on the kill screen is not easy by any means of course there's lots of upcoming potential with the new rolling technique which has allowed humans to access faster tapping speed than we ever could have previously imagined and is already being used to get numerous world records but for now stack rabbit is in mid level 37 and up to this point we've kind of gotten a good sample of what is general kill screen stacking looks like so we're gonna fast forward a little bit until its first major milestone and here we are on the verge of breaking 10 million after a whopping 840 lines of gameplay which is over three times the length of a normal game of tetris to kill screen but here it is one tetris away the next long bar will do it 10 million 85 000 and the score counter does not have any more digits to display it so it wraps around to letters of the alphabet so a represents 10 million b represents 11 million and so on and it is gonna get even funkier once it gets to the end of the alphabet and beyond but for now we're gonna fast forward again but here we are on the verge of hitting a thousand lines but it is getting a to a bit of a situation here so we'll see how i can dig out but some nice placements there and now it is on the verge of breaking a thousand lines and that long bar will do it and now the line counter has also started wrapping around the letters of the alphabet so for a second we can just sit back and admire the high level gameplay and from then we'll fast forward to the next big milestone [Music] and you can see as we're fast forwarding here that the score is going up rapidly through the millions and part of that is because every level that you go up you get more points for each tetris so the score potential has been increasing now it's not immediately obvious why we stopped here but you'll see in a second and there it is the first of the bugged color schemes that starts to occur when you get to high levels and the reason why we have all these weird color palettes which were not intended by the developers is that the game never thought we would get this far and so it has started reading random game data from the rom as if it was the colors and it is gonna get funky you can also see on the side i've given a nickname to each of the color schemes and let me know in the comments if you come up with some other ones some of them are quite funky so i had to get a little creative like this glowing spaghetti but you know you can kind of see it right i will say it was kind of tough because it turns out when you read game code as if it's colors for some particular reason there was a lot of dark colors and also glowing colors and we can see here that we have a repeat already we're not going to see too many of these there's just these three levels the first three that we saw happen again for some reason so we get we get a repeat of glowing spaghetti but after this it's gonna be all new for a long time so sit back and enjoy the beautiful chaos created by misinterpreting this game's code [Music] flip [Music] what [Music] bye [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] [Music] this [Music] [Music] uh [Music] uh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] uh [Music] wow [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] uh [Music] well i hope you've been enjoying these colors as much as i have but we are about to hit a major milestone for the game which is that you can see the score counter is out of alphabet there are no more letters to display the score so what it's going to start doing is reading into the sheet of sprites so it's a bunch of random graphics used for other stuff in the game but it's just gonna start using that for the scoresheet also this is one of my favorite level names but here is the sprite sheet so this is what it's gonna be reading from and we saw it just shifted over from z to negative sign and it's gonna go keep going to the right through all those sprites and it's gonna start using some of the menu blocks and some of the pieces themselves and we're still getting new colors so don't sleep on those new color schemes either of course i know this is a lot to take in between the level the score the sprites the colors and the placements themselves so let's just sit back and watch stack rabbit do its thing and keep pushing this game to its limits [Music] [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] uh and with that transition we have reached the end of the novel colors it's wrapped around to zero and it's going to go up through all the colors again including all the bugged colors so even though we're going to be fast forwarding in a sec it's going to be one last hurrah for all of your favorite color [Music] schemes at this point i also want to make a shout out to the sprites it's using in the score display these are the sprites that make the boxes on the level select screen but seeing them one by one like this is really bizarre and now we've stopped because we're on the verge of hitting a very cursed level this level 235 is gonna last for 800 lines that's three full games of tetris to kill screen just on this level and the colors are not going to change there's going to be a lot of this green of course the flip side of that is that it's a lot of opportunity to rack up points so it's at 65 million now but it's gonna go well beyond that although there is one thing that can stop stack rabbit and that is the crash at the end of the game some have dubbed it the true kill screen although there's no one set point where it happens it's vulnerable to crashing anywhere in the late 230s and early 240s and this crash comes from the fact that the later levels put immense pressure on the game's processor and struggles to keep up with score calculations but speaking of score look at its score it is on the verge of breaking a hundred million just one more tetris will do it and there it is the first hundred million in nes tetris and for context this game was also the first 50 million in nes tetris so it really goes to show how far stack rabbit is pushing the envelope now you can hear that the game is struggling right now the audio is super scuffed fortunately it's keeping up so far and score calculations are still going through but you can never fully rest easy fortunately it is finally nearing the end of this endless level 235. the line count is at u88 and once it reaches v it will finally start incrementing the level but that also means the danger of crashing is only increasing so it's still trying to milk out these last points on 235. and that tetris will do it and it transitions into 236 with 101 million points but it's playing on borrowed time here so every last tetris counts but it's not getting a long bar where is the long bar and there's the long bar and it's going to crash the game with that tetris into level 237 its final score is 102 million 250 2 920 at 3100 lines and i did a lot of fast forwarding in that video the uncut run time of that game is over an hour and five minutes long so hopefully that helps you appreciate how monumental this game is not only the first 50 million but also the first 100 million in nes tetris and also just a wonderful tour through what happens in the later levels so thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed and stay tuned for more stack rabbit and other content coming soon

Channel: Greg Cannon

Views: 1,041,063

Keywords: stack, rabbit, stackrabbit, NES, Tetris, CTWC, Artificial Intelligence, AI, level 255

Id: l_KY_EwZEVA

Length: 25min 47sec (1547 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/FeculentUtopia]

"He's a blern-hitting machine!"

"Exactly! He's a machine designed to hit blerns!"

[u/paleo2002]

He is so proud of his baby.

[u/beezy-slayer]

That was extremely fascinating

[u/Jon_Matrix]

This was really, really cool

[u/kingdead42]

I am amazed at how stable NES Tetris is, to just power through so far past what anyone would have debugged. And it sounds like the final crash is just a processor failing on such large calculations.

[u/InsaneLord]

This guy should be coming up with names for vape flavours

[u/SciencePhysicist]

When the AI goes rogue after crashing tetris, what does it start piling up to feed its hunger for stacking?

[u/Summebride]

Billy Mitchell to submit this to Twin Galaxies as his own

[u/z3r0w0rm]

I stumbled across this video a little while ago. I really like the color of the first glitched level. Very interesting to watch. Do yourself a favor and watch on 2.0x speed.