2048 is (PSPACE) Hard, but Sometimes Easy

Rahul Mehta

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arXiv · 1408.6315

2048 is (PSPACE) Hard, but Sometimes Easy

Rahul Mehta

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Abstract

We prove that a variant of 2048, a popular online puzzle game, is PSPACE-Complete. Our hardness result holds for a version of the problem where the player has oracle access to the computer player's moves. Specifically, we show that for an $n \times n$ game board $\mathcal{G}$, computing a sequence of moves to reach a particular configuration $\mathbb{C}$ from an initial configuration $\mathbb{C}_0$ is PSPACE-Complete. Our reduction is from Nondeterministic Constraint Logic (NCL). We also show that determining whether or not there exists a fixed sequence of moves $\mathcal{S} \in \{\Uparrow, \Downarrow, \Leftarrow, \Rightarrow\}^k$ of length $k$ that results in a winning configuration for an $n \times n$ game board is fixed-parameter tractable (FPT). We describe an algorithm to solve this problem in $O(4^k n^2)$ time.

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Rahul Mehta. 2014-08-27. 2048 is (PSPACE) Hard, but Sometimes Easy. https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.6315

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