8 AIMING DARTS

Last chapter, we used a set of organized but random simulations to pick moves in the game 2048. We adopted this random approach because the full game tree for 2048 is enormous. Rather than attempting to create and evaluate it, we instructed the computer to focus on the four choices immediately at hand, run as many simulations as possible given realistic constraints, and then make the choice that worked best, on average, across those simulations. The computer's performance turned out to be reasonably good. In the tests reported at the end of the chapter, the random approach outplayed several respectable baselines. Still, there is significant room for improvement.