Carrying on with computer games, in our story #50 - we take a look at a game that completed 37 years last week #Tetris and another popular science fiction game #StarCraft.

John Brzustowski in his graduate thesis demonstrated that in 1992 that Tetris is statistically destined to end.

He built a model of Tetris and analyzed the worst-case scenario, in which the machine is treated as an adversary, and proved that it is theoretically impossible to play an unlimited game of Tetris.

A study also predicts which StarCraft race will conquer space. Will it be Zerg? Terran? Protoss? For the last 2 decades, the three races of the perennially popular science fiction strategy game StarCraft have waged war across the Koprulu Sector on the outskirts of the Milky Way galaxy. 

Their armies have been painstakingly balanced against each other by the game's developer #Blizzard to ensure that fans could battle online forever with no race gaining a clear advantage.

However, a pair of researchers at the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh took it upon themselves to find out which race would ultimately triumph if given enough time. It was found that the Terran inhabitants of the fictitious Koprulu sector.

Now, these studies would seem highly trivial. But the study's primary goal was to increase public understanding of the scientific method and the statistical sciences. 

They want to know if additional research into online gaming communities can provide similar scientific discoveries to the #World of #Warcraft virus outbreak known as the Corrupted Blood Incident, which was used to examine the spread of actual epidemics.

Well, we can definitely say that learning and understanding through gamification are here to say!

Also, today is #math #storytelling #day, and cheers to the 50 math stories!!

Sources:

<1> Can you win at TETRIS? - Thesis by John Brzustowski.

<2> Study Predicts Which StarCraft Race Will Conquer Space - Article by Andrew Groen for Wired.

<3> How a Computer Game is Reinventing the Science of Expertise - Article by Sandra Upson for Scientific American.

<4> Google images.

#math #mathstories #story50 #computer #games #tetris #starcraft #science #research