2048 game

Sivaram Ambikasaran

SI
VA
RA
M

Those who have played/won the 2048 game will soon realize that the 2048 tile is by no means the upper
bound. An average player with reasonably sufficient time can easily reach 4096 tile (Figure 1(a)). So the
question is What is the upper bound of the maximum tile? The answer to this is evident for those who
have developed a strategy to play the game. (It is worth recalling that the key fact that the game exploits
is 2k + 2k = 2k+1 .) One of the popular strategies is to form the maximum tile at one of the four corners
of the board. A loose motivation behind this strategy is that fixing the tile at one of the corners gives
us two degrees of freedom (most of the time) under which the maximum tile wont move, thus making it
easier to focus on the rest of the board. Any other location for the maximum tile will result in moving the
maximum tile more frequently. Once we have our maximum tile, say M , at some corner, the strategy then is
M M
,
and so on in a snake
to populate the board going either row-wise or column-wise with tiles of value
2 4
like fashion (for instance, as shown in Figure 1(b) for a 4 4 case, with the maximum tile being formed at
the top-left and subsequent tiles being arrange row-wise in a clock-wise fashion).
M

M/2 M/22 M/23

M/27

M/26 M/25 M/24

M/211
8
9
10
M/2 M/2 M/2

(a) An occasion of 4096 appearing

M/214M/213M/212

(b) A possible strategy

If the randomness were to favor us, we would like to have to equal M/214 and the maximum value
M
of is 4. Hence, we need 14 = 4 = M = 216 . Once we have this, we have the domino effect and the
2
maximum tile that can be obtained is 2M = 217 at the top left corner.
The more general setting:
Given an n n n hypercube with 2, 4, . . . , 2k s appearing at random, what is the maximum hyper-tile
|
{z
}
d times

that can be reached?

By the same strategy, the answer is when

M
2nd 2

= 2k = M = 2n

+k2

and the maximum tile that

can be formed is 2n +k1 . For the usual game, with 2s and 4s appearing at random, we have n = 4, d = 2
(hypercube in 2D is a square) and k = 2 (4 = 22 ), giving the maximum tile as 217 .

Maximum score and maximum number of moves on a n n square: The users score starts at
zero, and is incremented whenever two tiles combine, by the value of the new tile. For instance, if a user
reaches tile 4 making use of two 2s, then the score increments by 4. Similarly, if a user reaches 8 making
use of only 2s, then the score would be
8 + 2 Reaching 4 using two twos = 8 + 2 4 = 16
In general, if S(m) denotes the increment in score on reaching a tile 2m , we have
S(2m ) = 2m + 2S(2m1 ) with S(21 ) = 0
Hence, we get
S(2m ) = 2m + 2m + 22 S(2m2 ) = (m 1)2m + 2m1 S(2) = (m 1)2m

SI
VA
RA
M

Hence, in the process of reaching the tile 2m , the maximum increment to the score is (m 1)2m . However,
when we want to reach the maximum tile, we would want the randomness to throw 4 at the bottom-left
square at the critical step and we do not get a score of 4 for forming this. Hence, the score we obtain in
the process of reaching the maximum tile is (m 1)2m 4. Once we have reached the maximum tile at
the top-right square, to reach the maximum score the goal is to form half of this tile at the square to its
immediate left and so on. Hence, the total score is
2
nX
+1

 2





(m 1)2m1 4 = 4 2n 1 n2 1

()

m=3

For the usual game played on 4 4 square, the maximum score is obtained by setting n = 4 in (), which
gives us the maximum score of 3, 932, 100 .
By a similar argument, if M (m) denotes the number of moves needed to reach a tile of 2m , then we have
M (2m ) = 1 + 2M (2m1 ) with M (2) = 0

Solving this recurrence gives us M (2m ) = 2m1 1. Hence, in the process of reaching the tile 2m , the
maximum number of moves we would have made is 2m1 1. However, when we want to reach the maximum
tile, we would want the randomness to throw 4 at the bottom-left square at the critical step and we do not
make a move to get this 4. Hence, the number of moves made to reach the maximum tile is 2m1 2. Once
we have reached the maximum tile at the top-right square, we can still make valid moves as discussed above.
Hence, the maximum number of possible moves is
2
nX
+1

 2




2m1 2 = 2 2n n2 + 1

()

m=3

For the usual game played on 4 4 square, the maximum number of moves is obtained by setting n = 4 in
(), which gives us the maximum number of moves as 131, 038 .
Similar expressions can be obtained for n-hypercube with 2, 4, . . . , 2k s appearing at random.