How to determine best move for tetris piece

I am creating an AI agent to play tetris. I am using A* algorithm to determine the path the piece should take to reach the target cell. Now i am working on the decision function that outputs what's the best possible location to place the tetris piece . In doing this i need to exhaust every possible move and rotation to determine the best combination for the piece . In doing this i'm stumped as if i were to call the various moves it would reflect on the screen and i don't want that . How would i go about achieving this goal?