> Yes, you will get a lot of S pieces. But it doesn't give you solely S pieces - if that were the case, then it would be possible to make lines forever, which is much too easy.
This is actually wrong. Some friends of mine proved that if you drop only S and Z pieces in an irrational ratio, the player is doomed irrespective of the dimensions of the board.
I can’t, but it was published in Eureka (Cambridge Maths Society/Archimedean journal) somewhere between 1988 and 1993 I think. I don’t know how to get old copies but they were all typeset in TeX.
The same people also proved (earlier) that with 3-ominos its a win for the player.
Incidentally, if you’re into cool maths that isn’t part of any major research line, Eureka is a great read.
The proof that Tetris is a win for the computer was published in Eureka 51 (1992) by Richard Tucker. (Someone else has posted a link to another paper proving this, but it's from 1997; Richard got there first.)
The proof that Tris is a win for the player was published in Eureka 51 (1991) by Adam Chalcraft. Richard and Adam definitely know one another and I would be unsurprised to learn that they talked to one another about this stuff, but the actual writeups in Eureka were by different people.
(Quite possibly a substantial amount of the thinking was done collectively at meetings of the "Puzzles and Games Ring", a sort of sub-organization of the Archimedeans (the student mathematical society at the University of Cambridge, which publishes Eureka).
