# Games

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## University of Alberta Solves Poker

The Daily Mail reports that the Computer Poker Research Group at the University of Alberta seems to have solved heads-up limit hold’em poker.

(My thanks to Glen for emailing me the story!)

## A short review of “Teaching Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to Play Go”

Christopher Clark and Amos Storkey wrote an interesting nine page article titled “Teaching Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to Play Go”.  Their deep neural network correctly predicted the moves of experts on a 19×19 Go about 44% of the time.  The previous record was 41% by Wistuba and Schmidt-Thieme in 2012.  Furthermore, the Clark Storkey network was able to “consistently defeat the well-known Go program GNU Go.”  This is the first time that a neural network was able to perform nearly as well as one of the better hand coded programs.  It is still not as good at the better UCT programs, but it moves much more quickly than the UCT programs.  I imagine that if there were a blitz version of computer Go, the Clark Storkey AI might win a computer competition.

The article reviews other recent attempts to train a neural network to play Go.  The Clark Storkey network resembled the Wistuba Schmidt-Thieme network, but it had more 19×19 convolutional layers and the authors added one fully connected layer at the top before the final move decision.  Also, known symmetries of the solution were hard-coded.  Interestingly, they found that convolution seemed to be required.

“We briefly experimented with non-convolutional networks but found them to be much harder to train, often requiring more epochs of training and the use of approximate second order gradient descent methods, while getting worse results.”

Later they describe their training methods and network architecture as follows

“Networks were trained with mini-batch gradient descent with a batch size of 128, using a learning rate of 0.01 for 7 epochs, and 0.05 for 2 epochs which took about a day on a Nvidia GTX 780 GPU.”

“The best network had one convolutional layer with 64 7×7 filters, two convolutional layers with 64 5×5 filters, two layers with 48 5×5 filters, two layers with 32 5×5 filters, and one fully connected layer.”

They estimate that their AI would probably have a ranking near 4-5 kyu.

## A review of “Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning”

Mnih, Kavukcuoglu, Silver, Graves, Antonoglon, Wierstra, and Riedmiller authored the paper “Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning” which describes and an Atari game playing program created by the company Deep Mind (recently acquired by Google). The AI did not just learn how to pay one game. It learned to play seven Atari games without game specific direction from the programmers. (The same learning parameters, neural network topologies, and algorithms were used for every game).

The 2600 Atari gaming system was quite popular in the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s. The games ran with only four kilobytes of RAM and a 210 x 160 pixel display with 128 colors. Various machine learning techniques have been applied to the old Atari games using the Arcade Learning Environment which precisely reproduces the Atari 2600 gaming system. (See e.g. “An Object-Oriented Representation for Efficient Reinforcement Learning” by Diuk, Cohen, and Littman 2008, ”HyperNEAT-GGP:A HyperNEAT-based Atari General Game Player” by Hausknecht, Khandelwal, Miikkulainen, and Stone 2012, “Application of TEXPLORE on Atari Games “ by Shung Zhang , ”A Neuroevolution Approach to General Atari Game Playing” by Hausknect, Lehman,” Miikkulalianen, and Stone 2014, and “Replicating the Paper ‘Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning’ ” by Korjus, Kuzovkin, Tampuu, and Pungas 2014.)

Various papers have been written on how computers can learn to pay the Atari games, but most of them used the abstract representations of objects on the screen within the emulator. The Mnih et al AI learned to play the games using only the raw 210 x 160 video and the score. It seems to be the first successful attempt to learn arcade gaming from raw video.

To learn from raw video, they first converted the video to grayscale and then downsampled/cropped to 84 x 84 images. The last four frames were used to determine actions. The 28224 input pixels were run through two hidden convolution neural net layers and one fully connected (no convolution) 256 node hidden layer with a single output for each possible action. Training was done with stochastic gradient decent using random samples drawn from a historical database of previous games played by the AI to improve convergence   (This technique known as “experience replay” is described in “Reinforcement learning for robots using neural nets” Long-Ji Lin 1993.)

The objective function for supervised learning is usually a loss function representing the difference between the predicted label and the actual label. For these games the correct action is unknown, so reinforcement learning is used instead of supervised learning. The authors used a variant of Q-learning to train the weights in their neural network. They describe their algorithm in detail and compare it to several historical reinforcement algorithms, so this section of the paper can be used as a brief introduction to reinforcement learning.

The AI was trained to play seven games: Beam Rider, Breakout, Enduro, Pong, Q*bert, Seaquest, and Space Invaders. In six of the seven games, this general game learning algorithm outperformed all previously known reinforcement learning algorithms tested on those games and “surpasses a human expert on three” of the seven games.

## “Grandmaster Clash”

Even if you are not into chess, I think you will enjoy reading about Caruana’s amazing performance at Sinquefield.

(The cast comes off my hand today.  I will be able to type with both hands soon!)

## Computers are getting better at Go

Monte Carlo Tree Search (survey) is working rather well for Go.

## An AI for 2048 – Part 4 Evaluation Functions

So far we have only considered blind strategies and a simple greedy strategy based on maximizing our score on every move.  The results were interesting because the blind cyclic strategy left-down-right-down did surprisingly well and we saw that a biased random strategy which strongly favored two orthogonal moves like left and down with a small amount of one other move like right outperformed all of the other biased random strategies.

If we want to do better, we need something more sophisticated than a blind strategy or pure, short-term, score greed.

The first approach used by game AI programmers in the olden days was to simply program in the ideas that the programmer had about the game into the game AI. If the programmer liked to put an X in the middle of a tic-tac-toe board, then he hard-wired that rule into the computer code.  That rule alone would not be enough to play tic-tac-toe, so the programmer would then just add more and more decision rules based on his own intuition until there were enough rules to make a decision in every game situation. For tic-tac-toe, the rules might have been

• If you can win on your next move, then do it.
• If your opponent has two in a row, then block his win.
• Take the center square if you can.
• Take a corner square if it is available.
• Try to get two squares in a single row or column which is free of your opponent’s marks.
• Move randomly if no other rule applies.

Though this approach can be rather successful, it tends to be hard to modify because it is brittle.  It is brittle in two ways: a new rule can totally change the behavior of the entire system, and it is very hard to make a tiny change in the rules.  These kind of rule based systems matured and incorporated reasoning in the nineties with the advent of “Expert Systems“.

Long before the nineties, the first game AI programmers came up with another idea that was much less brittle.  If we could just give every position a numerical rating, preferably a real number rather than an integer, then we can make small changes by adding small numbers to the rating for any new minor feature that we identify.

In tic-tac-toe, our numerical rating system might be as simple as:

• Add 100 to the rating if I have won,
• Subtract 100 if my opponent has won or will win on his next move,
• Add 5 if I own the central square,
• Add 2 points for each corner square that I own,
• Add 1 point for every row, column, or diagonal in which I have two squares and my opponent has no squares.

So, for example, the position below would be scored as

2 (for the upper left corner x) + 2 (for the other corner) + 1 (for the top row) = 5.

Now, in order to decide on a move, we could just look at every possible move, rate each of the resulting boards, and choose the board with the highest rating. If our tic-tac-toe position was the one below and we were the x player,

then we would have six possible moves.  Each move could be rated using our board rating system, and the highest rated board with x in the center and a rating of 8 would be chosen.

$\$

This approach was first applied to computer game AI by the famous theoretician Claude Shannon in the paper “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess” (1949), but the idea without the computers actually predates Shannon by hundreds of years.  For instance, the chess theoretician Giambatista Lolli published “Osservazioni teorico-pratiche sopra il giuoco degli scacchi ossia il Giuoco degli Scacchi” in 1763.  He was the first to publish the idea of counting pawns as 1, bishops as 3, knights as 3, rooks as 5, and queens as 9 thereby giving a rating to every board position in chess (well, at least a rating for the pieces).  Shannon modified this rating by subtracting 0.5 for each “doubled” pawn, 0.5 for each “isolated” pawn, 0.5 for each “backward” pawn, and adding 0.1 for each possible move.  Thus, if the pieces were the same for both players, no captures were possible, and if the pawns were distributed over the board in a normal fashion, Shannon’s chess AI would choose the move which created the most new moves for itself and removed the most moves from his opponent.

Shannon significantly improved on the idea of an evaluation function by looking more than one move ahead.  In two players games, the main algorithm for looking a few moves ahead before applying the evaluation function is the alpha-beta search method which will be tested in a later post.

Let’s try to find and test a few evaluation functions for 2048.

Perhaps the simplest idea for evaluating a position is related to flying. According the great philosopher Douglas Adams,

“There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. Its knack lies in learning to throw yourself at the ground and miss. … Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that presents the difficulties.”  (HG2G).

Suffice it to say that in 2048, the longer you delay the end of the game (hitting the ground), the higher your score (the longer your flight).  The game ends when all of the squares are filled with numbers, so if we just count every empty square as +1, then the board rating must be zero at the end of the game.

I ran 1000 simulated games with the Empty Tile evaluation function and got an average ending tile total of 390.  The strategy ended the games with a maximum tile of  512 tile 25 times, a 256 tile 388 times, 128 491 times, 64 92 times, and 32 4 times.

Well, that didn’t seem like anything spectacular.  Let’s try to group like tiles—if there are two 128 tiles, let’s try to put them side-by-side.  Of course, the idea of putting like tiles together is obvious.  Slightly less obvious is the idea of trying to put nearly equal tiles together.  Over at stackoverflow.com, the user ovolve, the author of the first 2048 AI, suggested the criteria of “smoothness” in his great post about how his AI worked.  There are some interesting ways to measure smoothness with Fourier transforms, but just to keep things simple, let’s measure smoothness by totaling the differences between side-by-side tiles.  For example, the smoothness of the board below would be

2+2+4 (first row) + 30+32 (second row) + 14+ 48 + 64  (third row) + 12 + 16 (fourth) + 2+0+2 (first col) + 30+16 + 0 (second) + 4 + 64 + 64   + 128 + 128

which sums to 662.

Once again I ran a 1000 games using smoothness as an evaluation function. The average ending tile total was 720, a new high.  The strategy had a maximum ending tile total of  1024 3 times, 512 263 times, 256 642 times, 128 87 times, and 64 5 times.  This looks very promising.

Let’s try ovolve’s last criteria — monotonicity.  The idea of monotonicity is that we prefer that each row or column is sorted.  On the board above, the top row

4 > 2 < 4 > 0 is not sorted.  The second 2 < 32 > 0 = 0 and forth 4 < 16 > 0 = 0 rows are sorted only if the spaces are ignored. The third row 2 < 16 < 64 < 128 is fully sorted.  Let’s measure the degree of monotonicity by counting how many times we switch from a less than sign to a greater than sign or vice-versa.  For the first row we get 2 changes because the greater than sign 4 > 2 changed to a less than sign 2 < 4 and then changed again in 4 > 0. We also get two changes for 2 < 32 > 0, no sign changes in the third row (perfectly monotonic), and two changes in the last row.

I ran 100 games using the monotonicity evaluation function.  The average ending tile total was 423.  The maximum tile was 512 16 times, 256 325 times, 128 505 times, 64 143 times, and 32 11 times.

I have summarized the results of these three simple evaluation functions in the table below.

Evaluation Func AETT Max Tile
Empty 390 512
Smoothness 720 1024
Monotonicity 420 512
Cyclic LDRD 680 512
Pure Random 250 256

Well, clearly Smoothness was the best.

There are three great advantages to numerical evaluation functions over if-then based rules.  One, you can easily combine completely different evaluation functions together using things like weighted averages.  Two, you can plot the values of evaluation functions as the game proceeds, or even plot the probability of winning against one or two evaluation functions.  Three, in 2048, there is the uncertainty where the next random tile will fall.  With numerical evaluation functions, we can average together the values of all the possible boards resulting from the random tile to get the “expected value”  (or average value) of the evaluation function after the random tile drop.

Well, that’s it for my introduction to evaluation functions.  Next time we will focus on more sophisticated evaluation functions and the powerful tree search algorithms that look more than one move ahead.

Have a great day.  – Hein

## An AI for 2048 – Part 3 Biased Random Blind Strategies

I will be continuing to post articles on AI for the game 2048.  The first two articles were:

PROGRAMMING

In this article, I will make some comments on the cyclic blind strategies and report on random blind strategies.  The cyclic results can be generated from the Mathematica source code that I posted earlier.  The Biased Random results below can be obtained by just modifying the strategy function in the Mathematica source code.

CYCLIC BLIND

In the Cyclic Blind Article, we saw that left-down-right-down had the highest performance of any length 4 or less cyclic strategy with an average end tile total (AETT) of about 680.  The other cyclic strategies fell into the following seven groupings:

1. All four directions alternating vertical and horizontal (dlur, drul)  420 AETT.
2. All four directions without alternating vertical and horizontal (durl, dulr, dlru, …)  270 AETT.
3. Three directions with one direction repeated twice in a row where the directions that were not repeated were opposite (durr, dllu, dull, drru, …) 390 AETT
4. Three directions with one direction repeated twice in a row where the directions that were not repeated were perpendicular (drrl, duur, ddlu, …) 330 AETT
5. Three directions with one direction repeated, but not twice in a row, and the directions that were not repeated were perpendicular (dudr, duru, dldu …) 295 AETT
6. Three directions with no repetition (dlu, dur, …)  360 AETT
7. One Horizontal Direction + One vertical direction with or without repetition 60 AETT.

BLIND RANDOM BIASED STRATEGIES

The other blind strategy to consider is independent random biased selection of directions.  For example, someone might try rolling a six sided die and going left on 1, right on a 2 and down for rolls of 3, 4, 5, or 6.  I ran 1000 games each for every possible biased random strategy where the strategy was of the form

left with probability L/T, right with probability R/T,  up with probability U/T, down with probability D/T,

where T was the total of L, R, U, and D, and L, R, U and D between 0 and 4.

The results are tabulated below

AETT    MAX
TILE  L/T   R/T   U/T   D/T
11.138   16   1.    0.    0.    0.
55.416   128  0.57  0.    0.43  0.
56.33    128  0.67  0.    0.33  0.
57.17    64   0.5   0.    0.5   0.
57.732   128  0.6   0.    0.4   0.
70.93    16   0.6   0.4   0.    0.
71.246   32   0.57  0.43  0.    0.
71.294   32   0.5   0.5   0.    0.
71.752   32   0.67  0.33  0.    0.
234.42   256  0.4   0.4   0.1   0.1
238.182  256  0.38  0.38  0.12  0.12
241.686  256  0.44  0.33  0.11  0.11
245.49   256  0.44  0.44  0.11  0.
246.148  256  0.4   0.3   0.2   0.1
247.046  256  0.5   0.25  0.12  0.12
247.664  256  0.36  0.36  0.18  0.09
250.372  256  0.43  0.29  0.14  0.14
253.09   256  0.44  0.22  0.22  0.11
254.002  512  0.5   0.38  0.12  0.
255.178  256  0.33  0.33  0.22  0.11
255.242  256  0.33  0.33  0.17  0.17
255.752  256  0.33  0.33  0.25  0.08
257.468  512  0.43  0.43  0.14  0.
258.662  512  0.36  0.27  0.27  0.09
258.832  256  0.57  0.29  0.14  0.
258.9    256  0.36  0.27  0.18  0.18
260.052  256  0.3   0.3   0.2   0.2
261.676  256  0.38  0.25  0.25  0.12
261.902  256  0.31  0.31  0.23  0.15
262.414  256  0.27  0.27  0.27  0.18
263.702  256  0.27  0.27  0.27  0.2
264.034  256  0.31  0.23  0.23  0.23
264.17   512  0.57  0.14  0.14  0.14
264.2    256  0.29  0.29  0.29  0.14
264.226  256  0.31  0.23  0.31  0.15
264.232  256  0.29  0.29  0.21  0.21
264.33   256  0.5   0.17  0.17  0.17
265.328  256  0.33  0.22  0.22  0.22
265.512  256  0.4   0.2   0.3   0.1
265.724  256  0.4   0.2   0.2   0.2
265.918  512  0.33  0.25  0.25  0.17
265.986  256  0.3   0.3   0.3   0.1
266.61   256  0.25  0.25  0.25  0.25
266.796  256  0.29  0.21  0.29  0.21
266.812  256  0.31  0.31  0.31  0.08
267.096  256  0.33  0.17  0.33  0.17
267.5    512  0.33  0.25  0.33  0.08
267.804  256  0.36  0.18  0.27  0.18
267.99   256  0.3   0.2   0.3   0.2
268.414  512  0.43  0.14  0.29  0.14
268.634  256  0.44  0.11  0.33  0.11
271.202  256  0.38  0.12  0.38  0.12
271.646  256  0.33  0.22  0.33  0.11
271.676  512  0.5   0.33  0.17  0.
272.128  256  0.36  0.18  0.36  0.09
273.632  256  0.5   0.12  0.25  0.12
279.82   256  0.4   0.1   0.4   0.1
281.958  256  0.4   0.4   0.2   0.
291.702  512  0.44  0.33  0.22  0.
306.404  256  0.38  0.38  0.25  0.
306.508  512  0.5   0.25  0.25  0.
310.588  512  0.43  0.29  0.29  0.
310.596  512  0.36  0.36  0.27  0.
321.016  512  0.4   0.3   0.3   0.
333.788  512  0.33  0.33  0.33  0.
340.574  512  0.5   0.17  0.33  0.
341.238  512  0.57  0.14  0.29  0.
342.318  512  0.44  0.22  0.33  0.
347.778  512  0.36  0.27  0.36  0.
355.194  512  0.38  0.25  0.38  0.
366.72   512  0.5   0.12  0.38  0.
369.35   512  0.43  0.14  0.43  0.
371.63   512  0.4   0.2   0.4   0.
384.962  512  0.44  0.11  0.44  0.

There are a few things you might notice.

• The  best strategy was 44% Left, 11% Right, and 44% down with a AETT of 385 which was much better than pure random (25% in each direction), but not nearly as good as the cyclic strategy left-down-right-down (AETT 686).
• The AETT varies smoothly with small changes in the strategy.  This is not surprising.  You would think that 55% up, 45% down would have nearly the same result as 56% up and 44% down.  The Extreme value theorem then tells us that there must be a best possible random biased strategy.
• The top 17 strategies in the table prohibit one direction with AETTs of 280 to 385.
• If the strategy uses just two directions, then it does very poorly.

Well that’s it for blind strategies.  Over the next few posts, we will introduce evaluation functions, null moves, quiescent search, alpha-beta prunning, and expectimax search.

## Mathematica 2048 Simulator

A guy named Phil asked me to post my code, so here it is.  It’s in Mathematica, so I imagine that most people will have trouble reading it.  I will probably rewrite the code in a more common, faster language later.

(* Mathematica code for simulating 2048
- by Hein Hundal (Public Domain)

Visit  http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/

for more detials.
*)

(* collapse[v] takes a list of values and returns a
collapsed list of values where two consecutive equal
values are summed into one value. *)

collapseAux[Cases[v, _Integer]]  , 4, "."];

collapseAux[{}] = {};
collapseAux[{x_}] = {x};
collapseAux[v_List] := If[ v[[1]] == v[[2]],
Prepend[ collapseAux[Drop[v, 2]], v[[1]]*2],
Prepend[ collapseAux[Drop[v, 1]], v[[1]]]];

vGlobalMoves = Characters["lrud"];
mGlobalEmptyBoard = Table[".", {4}, {4}];

move[mBoard_, sMove_String] := Switch[sMove,
"l", collapse /@ mBoard,
"r", Reverse /@ collapse /@ Reverse /@ mBoard,
"u", Transpose[ collapse /@ Transpose[ mBoard ]],
"d", Reverse[ Transpose[
collapse /@ Transpose[ Reverse[ mBoard]]]],
_, Throw[{"move::illeagal move", sMove}]];

(* game1Turn[ mStart_List, randFunc_, moveStrat_]
Performs one turn of the game.
- mStart is a 4 x4 game matrix where every elemet
is either a number 2, 4, 8, ... or the string ".".
- randFunc is any function that take a positive
integer n as input and outputs a positive integer
between 1 and n.
- moveStrat is any function that takes a game board as
an input and gives as an output one of the four
characters u, d, l, r.
- The output of game1Turn is a new board state.  *)

game1Turn[ mStart_List, randFunc_, moveStrat_] :=
Module[{sMove, mBoard, mEmpty, iSpot, iVal},
sMove = moveStrat[mStart];
mBoard = move[mStart, sMove];

(* only add a new piece if the board changed *)
If[ mBoard =!= mStart,
mEmpty = Position[mBoard, "."];
iSpot = randFunc[Length[mEmpty]];

(* the new board tile will either be a 4 or a 2 *)
iVal = If[ randFunc[10] == 1, 4, 2];
mBoard = ReplacePart[mBoard, mEmpty[[iSpot]] -> iVal]
];
mBoard];
(*  gameManyTurns  - executes iDo turns of the game  *)
gameManyTurns[mStart_List, randFunc_, moveStrat_, iDo_Integer] :=
NestList[game1Turn[#, randFunc, moveStrat] &, mStart, iDo];

(******************* Display Results of Multiple Runs **********)

periodTo0[m_List]  :=  m /. "." -> 0;
maxTile[m_List]    := Max[Flatten[periodTo0[m]]]
totalTiles[m_List] := Total[Flatten[periodTo0[ m ]]];

rand1[i_Integer] := 1 + RandomInteger[i - 1];

(* rand2[m]   replaces a random entry on the board m with a 2 *)
rand2[m_List] := ReplacePart[ m,
(RandomInteger[3, {2}] + 1) -> 2];

runSeveralGames[ randFunc_, moveStrat_, iDo_Integer]  :=
Module[{},
Table[
(* run a single game for 100 turns *)
ten1 = gameManyTurns[rand2[mGlobalEmptyBoard],
randFunc, moveStrat, 100];

(* keep going until there is not change for 50 moves *)
While[ ten1[[-50]] =!= ten1[[-1]]  && Length[ten1] < 10000,
ten1 =  Join[ten1, gameManyTurns[ten1[[-1]],
randFunc, moveStrat, 100]]
];

ten2 = TakeWhile[ ten1, # =!= ten1[[-1]] &];

(* output a list {# turns of the game, tile Total,
maximum tile} for each game *)
{Length[ten2], totalTiles[Last[ten1]], maxTile[ten1[[-1]]]},
{iDo}]];

stats[mRes_List] := Module[{mRN = N@mRes},
{Mean[mRN], StandardDeviation[mRN], Max[mRes[[All, 3]]],
Tally[mRes[[All, 3]]] // Sort}];

(******** Blind Cyclic Strategy ****************************)

(* createCyclicStrategy - creates a cyclic strategy function
from the string s.  If s = "uddl", then the strategy function
will repeat the sequence move up, move down, move down, and
move left indefinitely. *)

createCyclicStrategy[sMoves_String] := Module[
{exHeld, iCount = 1},
exHeld = Hold[
Function[ m, chars[[ Mod[iCount++, iStringLength] + 1]]]];
ReleaseHold[
exHeld /. {chars -> Characters[sMoves] ,
iStringLength -> StringLength[sMoves]}]];

testOneStrategy[] := Module[{},
stratDRDL = createCyclicStrategy["drdl"];
mRes = runSeveralGames[rand1, stratDRDL, 100];
stats[mRes]];

## An AI for 2048 — Part 2 Cyclic Blind Strategies

In my last post, I described how to play 2048 and reported the results of some simple simulations.  Namely, I reported the results of two very simple strategies:

• Random play will achieve an average ending tile total (AETT) of 252 and usually the highest tile will be a 64 tile or a 128 tile (about an 85% chance of ending with one of those).
• A pure greedy strategy where the player just tries to make the largest new tile possible results in an average ending tile total (AETT) of 399 and usually the highest tile will be a 128 tile or a 256 tile (about an 87% chance of ending with one of those).

## Blind Strategies

Perhaps surprisingly, there are “blind” strategies that will do even better than the pure greedy strategy.  Blind strategies are strategies that ignore the current state of the board.  I tried two types of simple blind strategies “biased random” and “repeating sequences”.  I will summaries the results of the biased random trials in my next post.

The simplest repeating strategy would be just hitting the same key every time—down, down, down, ….   Of course that does not do well.  Nor would down, up, down, up, ….  So the simplest repeating strategy worth trying would be down, right, down, right or some other combination of horizontal and vertical moves.  I ran 100 games for every possible repeated sequence of two to four moves and found that the best of these sequences was down, right, down, left  or a version of that sequence in disguise.  The results are captured in the table below.

Notice that restricting your moves to only two out of the four possibilities does poorly.  The Down, Left, Down, Left… strategy had an average tile total of only 44.38 at the end of the game and that strategy never created a tile above 64.

The best strategies were down-right-down-left or that same strategy in disguise (dlul, dldr, and drur are really the same strategy).  Notice that this strategy does better than pure greedy which had an AETT of 399.

 move sequence AETT Largest Tile dl 44.38 64 ddll 46.98 64 drrd 47.98 64 dld 51.18 64 ddrr 52.68 64 drdd 53.32 64 dll 53.46 64 dlld 54.32 64 dr 55.76 64 drd 56. 64 ddrd 57.48 64 dldd 57.66 128 dlll 58. 128 ddl 58.5 64 ddr 58.58 64 drr 59.9 64 drrr 60.56 64 ddld 61.62 64 dddr 66.78 64 dddl 68.46 64 dulr 262.44 256 durl 266.8 256 drlu 267.38 256 dlru 273.4 256 drlr 290.96 256 drdu 295.4 256 dlrl 298.5 256 duld 298.58 256 dldu 307.06 256 duru 308.8 256 dllr 309.32 512 dlrr 312.56 256 dudr 313.38 512 druu 314.58 256 duul 315.74 512 dudl 315.82 512 dulu 317.16 256 dluu 322.48 512 ddul 323.92 256 dlud 325.92 256 ddur 326.6 512 ddru 328.5 256 durd 329.12 512 drud 333.7 256 drll 337.92 512 ddlu 338.6 512 duur 345.62 512 dlu 345.88 256 dru 348.1 512 drrl 348.26 512 dur 352.72 256 dul 354.64 512 ddrl 357.3 512 dlr 361.1 512 ddlr 372.24 512 drl 373.32 256 drru 375.3 512 dull 377.38 512 dllu 379. 512 durr 385.38 512 dlrd 404.16 512 drld 404.6 512 drul 435.72 512 dlur 440.06 512 drur 614.9 512 dldr 620.36 512 dlul 627.06 512 drdl 686.28 512

## An AI for 2048 — Part 1

So I played the game 2048 and thought it would be fun to create an AI for the game.  I wrote my code in Mathematica because it is a fun, terse language with easy access to numerical libraries since I was thinking some simple linear or logit regression ought to give me some easy to code strategies.

The game itself is pretty easy to code in Mathematica.  The game is played on a 4×4 grid of tiles.  Each tile in the grid can contain either a blank (I will hereafter use a _ to denote a blank), or one of the numbers 2,4,8,16,32,64,128, 256, 512, 1024, or 2048.  On every turn, you can shift the board right, left, up, or down. When you shift the board, any adjacent matching numbers will combine.

The object of the game is to get one 2048 tile which usually requires around a thousand turns.

Here’s an example.  Suppose you have the board below.

If you shift right, the top row will become _, _, 4, 16, because the two twos will combine.  Nothing else will combine.

Shifting left gives the same result as shifting right except all of the tiles are on the left side instead of the right.

If we look back at the original image (below), we can see that there are two sixteen tiles stacked vertically.

So the original board (above) shifted down combines the two sixteens into a thirty-two (below) setting some possible follow-up moves like combining the twos on the bottom row or combining the two thirty-twos into a sixty-four.

There are a few other game features that make things more difficult.  After every move, if the board changes, then a two or four tile randomly fills an empty space. So, the sum of the tiles increases by two or four every move.

## Random Play

The first strategy I tried was random play.  A typical random play board will look something like this after 50 moves.

If you play for a while, you will think that this position is in a little difficult because the high numbers are not clumped, so they might be hard to combine.  A typical random game ends in a position like this one.

In the board above, the random player is in deep trouble.  His large tiles are near the center, the 128 is not beside the 64, there are two 32 tiles separated by the 64, and the board is almost filled.  The player can only move up or down.  In this game the random player incorrectly moved up combining the two twos in the lower right and the new two tile appeared in the lower right corner square ending the game.

I ran a 1000 random games and found that the random player ends the game with an average tile total of 252.  Here is a histogram of the resulting tile totals at the end of all 1000 games.

(The random player’s tile total was between 200 and 220 one hundred and twenty seven times.  He was between 400 and 420 thirteen times.)

The random player’s largest tile was 256 5% of the time, 128 44% of the time, 64 42% of the time, 32 8% of the time, and 16 0.5% of the time.  It seems almost impossible to have a max of 16 at the end.  Here is how the random player achieved this ignominious result.

## The Greedy Strategy

So what’s a simple improvement?  About the simplest possible improvement is to try to score the most points every turn—the greedy strategy.  You get the most points by making the largest tile possible.  In the board below, the player has the options of going left or right combining the 32 tiles, or moving up or down combining the two 2 tiles in the lower left.

The greedy strategy would randomly choose between left or right combining the two 32 tiles.  The greedy action avoids splitting the 32 tiles.

I ran 1000 greedy player games games.  The average tile total at the end of a greedy player simulation was 399—almost a 60% improvement over random play. Here is a histogram of the greedy player’s results.

If you look closely, you will see that is a tiny bump just above 1000.  In all 1000 games, the greedy player did manage to get a total above 1000 once, but never got the elusive 1024 tile.  He got the 512 tile 2% of the time, the 256 tile 43% of the time, the 128 44%, the 64 11%, and in three games, his maximum tile was 32.

I ran a number of other simple strategies before moving onto the complex look ahead strategies like UCT.  More on that in my next post.