The board is ten cells wide so if you always get the long piece then it takes four pieces to make a line. Lovetris gives you two long pieces and then an S[1] which means you can make a line in three pieces. That's the sense in which Lovetris is "better" than your proposed algorithm.

[1] if you lie the two long pieces horizontally next to each other against the left wall

Making a single line is a very bad thing to do in Tetris. You always want to make four lines simultaneously, and there's no easier way to do that than by stacking long pieces.

I'm not trying to argue what is a good or bad thing in Tetris. I'm trying to explain the algorithm. Hatetris tries to maximise the minimum time to removing a line; Lovetris, as explained by its author[1], flips a sign, thus it tries to minimise the minimum time to removing a line.

If that contradicts your notion of "best piece" then either the author is being too imprecise or you are being too literal. Either way I don't think it's an interesting discussion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27083716

> Either way I don't think it's an interesting discussion.

There is a worthwhile observation to make here, which is that even though Hatetris assigns scores to all the pieces and correctly determines, based on those scores, which one is the worst, Lovetris cannot correctly determine which piece is the best by picking "the opposite of what Hatetris does". Good is the opposite of bad, but the metrics for badness are not simultaneously metrics for goodness.

Hmm, it wasn't my understanding that Hatetris did that. I thought it tried to maximise time to completing a single line, but I may be misremembering or may have misunderstood. Moreover, if it did do what you claim it does then I believe that reversing a sign would end up always giving you the long piece.

Fair enough.