Story: Hatetris - Obsession, Friendship, and World Records

What It Covers

Two friends obsess over Hatetris, a malicious JavaScript Tetris variant, spending months and hundreds of dollars to break world records using beam search algorithms.

Key Questions Answered

• •Technical Implementation: Build six emulators progressing from Mathematica to Rust, achieving 200,000x speed improvement from initial tenth-second-per-move to five microseconds per core through optimization.
• •Cloud Computing Costs: AWS 72-core instances cost more than budgeted when games run longer than expected due to single-threaded file operations becoming bottlenecks at scale.
• •Heuristic Development: Quiescent lookahead (bird-in-hand heuristic) dramatically outperforms brute force approaches, achieving 148 points with 100,000 beam width versus 86 points with 25,000,000 width.
• •Community Knowledge Sharing: Publishing methods openly accelerates progress across competitors - each record holder built upon previous approaches, creating collaborative advancement despite competitive environment.