as well as one for the Nintendo 3DS, which included a retail release. Reception The game has been described by The Wall Street Journal as "almost like Candy Crush for math geeks", and Business Insider called it "Threes on steroids". Caitlin Dewey of The Washington Post called it "a nerdy, minimalist, frustrating game", while The Independent called it "addictive". The phenomenon of 2048 has been compared to that of Flappy Bird by several commentators. Both games' success, and their simplicity, led to the rapid creation of many variants, and both games have been described as "viral" and "very addictive". James Vincent of The Independent labeled 2048 as "a clone of a clone". In April 2014, Pocket Gamer reported that 15 new clones of Threes were released daily in the App Store. When asked if he was concerned that his situation would end up as stressed as that of Nguyễn Hà Đông, the creator of Flappy Bird, Cirulli said that he had "already gone through that phase" on a smaller scale, and that once he had decided against monetizing 2048, he "stopped feeling awkward." In response to rampant cloning, the creators of Threes published a log of how the game evolved over its 14-month development cycle. They said they had tried and dismissed 2048 tile merging variant, because it made the game too easy. In a 2014 Wired article, they claimed to have each beaten 2048 on their first play. AI The mathematical nature of 2048 has made the game of interest to AI researchers. As of 2022, AI achieved over 95% (likely over 98%, but the measurement has noise) probability of making a 16384 tile, over 75% (likely over 80%) probability of making a 32768, and over 3% probability of making a 65536 (improving over the results in and ). Due to randomness and lack of spare room, the optimal probability of making a 65536 tile is expected to be low; this is supported by optimal solutions for constrained boards. 2048 AI strategy uses expectimax search up to a certain (variable) depth, plus transposition tables to avoid duplication. Analogously to endgame tablebases, tables are used to estimate success (for building a large enough tile without destroying the configuration) in appropriate positions with many large tiles. A position evaluation function can favor empty squares, having a large number of merge possibilities, placement of larger tiles at the edge, and monotonicity for