I have recently stumbled upon the game [2048][1]. You merge similar tiles by moving them in any of the four directions to make &quot;bigger&quot; tiles. After each move, a new tile appears at random empty position with a value of either `2` or `4`. The game terminates when all the boxes are filled and there are no moves that can merge tiles, or you create a tile with a value of `2048`.

One, I need to follow a well-defined strategy to reach the goal. So, I thought of writing a program for it.

My current algorithm:

    while (!game_over) {
        for each possible move:
            count_no_of_merges_for_2-tiles and 4-tiles
        choose the move with a large number of merges
    }

What I am doing is at any point, I will try to merge the tiles with values `2` and `4`, that is, I try to have `2` and `4` tiles, as minimum as possible. If I try it this way, all other tiles were automatically getting merged and the strategy seems good.

But, when I actually use this algorithm, I only get around 4000 points before the game terminates. Maximum points AFAIK is slightly more than 20,000 points which is way larger than my current score. Is there a better algorithm than the above?

  [1]: http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/


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What is the optimal algorithm for the game 2048?