beyond that to reach higher scores. When the player has no legal moves (there are no empty spaces and no adjacent tiles with the same value), the game ends. Strategy Strategies in 2048 include keeping the highest tiles in a specific corner and to keep that tile in that corner and to fill the specified row with the highest numbers. Development Nineteen-year-old Gabriele Cirulli created the game in a single weekend as a test to see if he could program a game from scratch. "It was a way to pass the time", he said. He described it as being "conceptually similar" to the recently released iOS game Threes, and a clone of another game, 1024. Developed by Veewo Studio, 1024 is itself a clone of Threes, with its App Store description once reading "no need to pay for Threes". Cirulli's README for 2048 cites another 1024 clone as influence: the homonymous but slightly different in terms of mechanics 2048 by Saming. Cirulli was surprised when his weekend project received over 4 million visitors in less than a week. The game is free to play, Cirulli having said that he was unwilling to make money "from a concept that [he] didn't invent". He released ports for iOS and Android in May 2014. Adaptations The simple controls allowed it to be used in a promo video for the Myo gesture control armband, and the availability of the code underneath allowed it to be used as a teaching aid for programming. The second-place winner of a coding contest at Matlab Central Exchange was an AI system that would play 2048 on its own. As the source code is available, many additions to the original game, including a score leaderboard, an undo feature, and improved touchscreen playability have been written by other people. All are available to the public. Spinoffs have been released online and include versions with elements from the Doge meme, Doctor Who, Flappy Bird and Tetris. There has also been a 3D version and versions with bigger or smaller grids. Cirulli sees these spinoffs as "part of the beauty of open source software" and does not object to them "as long as they add new, creative modifications to the game". In 2014, an unofficial clone of the game was published in the iOS app store by Ketchapp, monetized with advertising. There has also been a Doctor Who spinoff of the game,