Exploring Tetris as a Transformation Semigroup

Tetris is a popular puzzle video game, invented in 1984. We formulate two versions of the game as a transformation semigroup and use this formulation to view the game through the lens of Krohn-Rhodes theory. In a variation of the game upon which it restarts if the player loses, we find permutation group structures, including the symmetric group \(S_5\) which contains a non-abelian simple group as a subgroup. This implies, at least in a simple case, that iterated Tetris is finitarily computationally universal.