Threes! Fives, 1024! and 2048 are hard
Stefan Langerman, Yushi Uno · DROPS (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics) · 2016
We analyze the computational complexity of the popular computer games Threes! 1024! 2048 and many of their variants. For most known versions expanded to an m x n board, we show that it is NP-hard to decide whether a given starting position can be played to reach a specific (constant) tile value.