The Mathematics of 2048: Counting States with Combinatorics

Updates 2017-09-25 There was some lively discussion about this article on Hacker News. This post is the second in a series. Next: Counting States by Exhaustive Enumeration. In my last 2048 post, I found that it takes at least 938.8 moves on average to win a game of 2048. The main simplification that enabled that calculation was to ignore the structure of the board — essentially to throw the tiles