In contrast, our human players tend to adopt the escalation strategy early in their game but switch to the endurance strategy as speed demands increase. The best hare models adopt an escalation strategy which stresses multi-line clears. The best tortoise models adopt an endurance strategy which emphasizes single-line over multi-line clears. For both studies, we select the longest running tortoise model and compare its score and behavior with that of the best scoring hare model. Hare models are stopped after 506 episodes. In two studies, we test three sets of 1,771,561 feature-based machine players (MPs) (11 6, 11 weights for each of 6 features) of Tetris for both long-running (tortoise) and short-running (hare) MPs.

Following a divide-and-conquer strategy, we adopt a machine modeling approach to isolate the contribution of sequential decision-making from the other three skills. Tetris is a complex task which taps into several human skills: among them perceptual learning, planning, motor skills, and sequential decision-making.

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