2048

Yes, I became a bit obsessed with the game for a while. If you don't know the game I'm talking about, I'm referring to the 2048 and the objective is to gather powers of 2 to get them add to 2048. You may want to go play the original version here.

The Internet of course didn't stop there and as an unstoppable avalanche created different versions of the game. I must say that professors of both my universities star in some of the games. See the ITAM edition and the Uni of Bath edition. Personally, my favourite version is the Doctor Who edition starring all 11 doctors.

Later on, I found an app for my phone and I was able to play it on the go. The problem was that when I posted my score on facebook I realised there is an option menu to play indefinitely. That meaning that the game wouldn't stop after getting 2048... so the natural thing to do was go for the 4096 and of course 8192.

The problem of course is that space is crucial and optimising the space to get higher and higher numbers becomes increasingly difficult... and of course there's a random element that complicates things even further. I haven't seen any pages where there are some serious maths on the game, however I found some people are gathering Matlab implementations and algorithms that give high scores. Personally I haven't done (nor plan to do) any algorithmic implementation or real maths about it. Having said that, here's my personal best mark when I decided to retire from the game from a while.