4Blocks with AI

4Blocks with AI

I’ve been wanting to write another blog post on the series on DSELs I’ve been planning, but I’ve been really swamped with work lately. So once more I’ll post a video or two on something I’ve been working on. It’s the 4blocks game again, this time playing on its own with an AI I’ve written for it. Here are the videos:


On the whole these were two good runs. I’ve had much better and much worse runs of course.

The AI is by no means perfect but it uses the DSEL techniques in Haskell. I have two languages acting here:
1. A Tetris DSEL
2. Haskell acting as a meta-language over the Tetris DSEL.

What is happening is that for every new brick the game state is queried by Haskell for certain information such as occupied blocks or number of lines. Using this information, by means of Haskell’s case statement I simply trigger one of a possible number of strategies. These strategies acquire certain information from the game state and generate a DSEL script. This script is then carried out by a DSEL script interpreter.

There are numerous problems with the AI and its mostly because I haven’t had time to write more strategies or a more intelligent way to select what according to the selected strategy is the best final brick destination.

That’s about it for now. Let me know what you think.

4 comments

  1. I think that we want to see some code snippets of how the strategies are defined 🙂
    Especially since your AI seems to play just like me. Though maybe that’s just the common way to play.

    1. Yes Andrea 😉 I will 100% make available the code for tetris once I am finished with it. Also if my tutor is ok with it I will release the AI code. 🙂

  2. Hi Andrew. I am relatively new to Haskell programming and the idea of DSELs. I found it very interesting and would really like to see how it is done. Probably a high level explanation and the general principles used in creating the DSEL along with the code for the strategies and the AI.

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