A scoreboard on the upper-right keeps track of the user's score. The user's score starts at zero, and is increased whenever two tiles combine, by the value of the new tile. The game is won when a tile with a value of 2048 appears on the board. Players can continue beyond that to reach higher scores.

In the game, users are challenged to combine tiles containing similar numbers to create new tiles with larger 2048cupcakes numbers until they reach the final tile, which contains the number 2,048. Since releasing the game, “2048” has gained high popularity and sparked dozens of copycat games, much to Cirulli's surprise.

This game is classified as an NP-hard problem. Finding an optimal solution that guarantees optimal moves in all situations is computationally challenging. However, an algorithm called Expectimax is considered the most efficient solution for this problem.In this post, we'll answer that question by modeling the game of 2048 as a Markov chain and analyzing it to show that, no matter how well the player plays, the number of moves required to win the game is