Tag: xte

This new, simple, addictive game is out, called 2048. You need to slide two numbers together, resulting in a bigger number, in ever-increasing powers of two. You get 2048, and you win.

I noticed that somebody already wrote neat AI for it, although it does run quite slowly. But then I also noticed a friend mashing keys in a simple pattern, and thought I should test whether this was more effective. The answer: it kinda is.

At least in the first half of the game, a simple key-mashing pattern is a much faster way to build high numbers. The PHP script below will usually get to 512 without much trouble, but rarely to 1024. I would suggest running it for a while, and then taking over with some strategy.

The script

This script spits out commands which can be piped to xte for some automatic key-mashing on GNU / Linux. Save as 2048.php

#!/usr/bin/env php
mouseclick 1
<?php
for($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++) {
	move("Left", 1);
	move("Right", 1);
}

while(1) {
	move("Down", 1);
	move("Left", 1);
	move("Down", 1);
	move("Right", 1);
}

function move($dir, $count) {
	for($i = 0; $i < $count; $i++) {
		echo "key $dir\nsleep 0.025\n";
		usleep(25000);
	}
}

And then in a terminal, run this then click over to a 2048 game:

sleep 3; php 2048.php | xte

Good luck!