Mad Russian Teaches Cats to Juggle and Unicycle Through Flaming Hoops; Western Scientists Declare it Impossible to get Supercomputer to Play Tetris.

28th August 2003

Scientists from Universities in Europe, Great Britain and the United States have all come to the conclusion it is impossible to program a Supercomputer to adequately perform at the arcade classic, Tetris.

Apparently, whilst able to trounce Gary Kasparov at Chess – and even score a goal against Football World Cup holders Brazil – even the most sophisticated Supercomputer struggled to get past Level 10 without using the cheats.

“They were quite crafty at that,” Professor Keith Wilson from Cambridge University explained, “We’d be monitoring their progress through the first few levels, turn around to check on the Supercomputer playing Space Invaders and when we looked back he was at level 250 with a score most computers, well 4 function calculators, would struggle to fit in their memory.”

Mean while, in Russia, Mad Professor John Smith made up for his lack of a stereotypical wacky Russian-esque name by training a large group of juggling cats, who can also ride a unicycle through a maze of flaming hoops, and sit on peoples’ laps without sticking their claws out.

“It was quite easy,” the unemployed 57 year old explained to us, “People say you can’t train cats to do anything because they only do as they please – but people say you can’t train someone to play Tetris, that it requires some special skill. Like everything there is a way and once you know it, the task is simple.”

When we questioned Professor Wilson about the Russian’s comments he was quite perplexed:

“How on earth can it be easy? I have got an IQ of 168 and I only discovered last week the rockets got bigger if you scored over 150,000. It’s ridiculous, one day we will get a super computer to score well at Tetris and our dissertation will show it was a very difficult and complicated feat to achieve.”

We went on to ask Professor Wilson whether the mathematical processing power of Super Computers could be harnessed for practical purposes such as breaking codes, calculating the origin/future of the Universe, or predicting lottery results Professor Wilson maintained the importance of video games:

“Why cheapen such an important device by making it a glorified Mystic Meg? At the moment we are finding out so much – only last week our newest machine broke the world record for time taken in completing Sonic the Hedgehog.”