Tetris Is Hard with Just One Piece Type

We analyze the computational complexity of Tetris clearing (determining whether the player can clear an initial board using a given sequence of pieces) and survival (determining whether the player can avoid losing before placing all the given pieces in an initial board) when restricted to a single polyomino piece type. We prove, for any tetromino piece type P except for O, the NP-hardness of Tetris clearing and survival under the standard Super Rotation System (SRS), even when the input sequence consists of only a specified number of P pieces. These surprising results disprove a 23-year-old conjecture on the computational complexity of Tetris with only I pieces (although our result is only for a specific rotation system). As a corollary, we prove the NP-hardness of Tetris clearing when the sequence of pieces has to be able to be generated from a 7k-bag randomizer for any positive integer k ≥ 1. On the positive side, we give polynomial-time algorithms for Tetris clearing and survival when the input sequence consists of only dominoes, assuming a particular rotation model, solving a version of a 9-year-old open problem. Along the way, we give polynomial-time algorithms for Tetris clearing and survival with 1 × k pieces (for any fixed k), provided the top k-1 rows are initially empty, showing that our I NP-hardness result needs to have filled cells in the top three rows.