2048x4

So there's this hot new game, 2048. First I said I wouldn't be part of the craze. But then I was.

Stage 1: I went on an intuition of combining numbers as opportunistically as possible. This got me to 512 and 5000ish points on my first attempt, 7 or 8k points on the 2nd, but getting past 512 seemed really hard; the board fills up with disjoint numbers.

Stage 2: In a comment thread I saw someone's simple algorithm for an AI:
go up if possible
if not, go left or right, depending on which consumes more numbers after an 'up' followup.
if all else fails, go down. Commentary was that you never want to go down if you can avoid it; logic wasn't given.

Spamming that got me to 13,000 points on the first use, and probably 1024. I know I've seen 1024, and I think the 10th Doctor on a Doctor Who clone (definitely the 9th, but that's like 512.) Further scores tended to be lower, around 7000, though having a dumb algorithm beat me was humbling. Couldn't get past 1024.

Then I thought about it again, inspired by a diagram I'd seen. And this works, so if you want to figure it out on your own, shoo.

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With that I quickly got 2048. I don't remember if it was on the first attempt, but soon. Then again, and again, and again. Not quite in a streak, but close enough that it's not a fluke nor a mining of many attempts. Scores ranging from 22516 to 32908. 4096 seems a long way off, though.

Feels a bit like my nethack ascension. Played for years, then Ascended, then Ascended again. Something had clicked.