Michael Birken, a resourceful java programmer, has used his programming know-how to craft an algorithm that can convert a picture into a Tetris game. His algorithm goes through and image and finds the various pixels and their shapes and finds spots where a Tetrimino could be placed. As Birken states on his site,
“The Tetris Printer Algorithm converts each row of the bitmap image in a series of passes. Moving from left to right, each pass greedily plugs in J, T and L Tetriminos whenever they fit. For example, the image below contains a row of 16 pixels from a bitmap image.
The 5 passes required to cover the 16 pixels appear in the images below.”
More detail can be found on Birken’s site, which is linked below, but it is crazy to think that no other programmer has tried anything like this.
Finally, for those of you that also call yourself programmers, you can even check out his source code of the Tetris Printer here. Now the only one question remains, can the greatest Tetris players in the world craft images like this program? Hopefully one day we can see them fight side by side, making an awesome sprite of Mario.
