The circuit boards were connected to the computer by 24 cables running up and down the dumbwaiter shaft.
Lower floors were lighted in turn, giving the illusion of the shape's falling down the library's facade. The circuit boards controlled the lights on each frame based on the signals they received from a computer on the third floor, with each lighted frame forming one block of a four-block shape.
The students built 100 4-by-4-foot wooden frames, wrapped each one with strings of Christmas lights and installed two of them in each window.Įach frame had a small relay that was connected by a cable to a circuit board, in a dumbwaiter shaft on each floor. Floors 4 through 13 were used for the game, and each floor has five windows across the facade. Tech House began the installation in January on the south side of the 14-story library. The object of the game is to keep clearing out rows as the falling blocks speed up. Tetris was developed 15 years ago by Alexey Pajitnov, a Russian mathematician, and involves manipulating four shapes (each made up of four blocks) as they fall down the screen to form horizontal rows, which disappear when they are complete. ''So we got permission to do it legally.'' ''We realized that if we did it as a prank, it would only be able to work for a short time and would get us all expelled,'' Mr. The idea had been kicking around for a couple of years before Nik Lochmatow, a Tech House member and art student, got permission to go ahead with it. The Tetris installation had been conceived as a prank by Technology House, a residence for Brown students interested in science and technology, including Mr. Powered by 14 custom-built circuit boards, a data network that traveled several hundred feet and 10,000 Christmas lights, a 10-story version of Tetris was played on the facade of the decidedly squarish library on the Providence, R.I., campus. Dreibelbis, a senior, was able to see his vision become a reality. This month, after months of planning and working with other students, Mr. In describing the reasons for recreating the classic video game Tetris on the side of the Sciences Library at Brown University, Keith Dreibelbis, a computer science major, wrote, ''For anyone who has ever played way too much Tetris, and looked at squarish buildings, it is easy to start hallucinating Tetris blocks in them.''
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