An Investigation into 2048 AI Strategies

2048 is a recent stochastic single player game, originally written in JavaScript for playing in a web browser but now largely played on mobile devices [1]. This paper discusses the applicability of Monte-Carlo Tree-Search (MCTS) to the problem, and also Averaged Depth Limited Search (ADLS). While MCTS plays reasonably well for a player with no domain knowledge, the ADLS player fares much better given an evaluation function that rewards board properties. Attempts to guide the roll-outs of MCTS using an evaluation function proved fruitless.