
Artificial Intelligence has crushed all human records in 2048 (2015) - hunglee2
http://www.randalolson.com/2015/04/27/artificial-intelligence-has-crushed-all-human-records-in-2048-heres-how-the-ai-pulled-it-off/
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henpa
I swear I'd read some kind of "futuristic" news article (written in 2015, yes,
but faking to have been written in the future). Was I wrong. ;-) Awesome
nonetheless.

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halotrope
Same here. I was expecting some AI distopia story. I left disappointed for the
comments despite this being a potentially interesting read.

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Dwolb
This is really cool and after reading the article, I'm left with the desire to
ask a bit more.

A game like 2048 is pretty straight forward and after you figure it out (i.e.
you understand the 4 pieces of advice the AI figured out) the game feels like
mostly chance (as the article states).

>Some games ended in a few minutes due to a series of unfortunate random tile
spawns, while others nearly lasted 4 hours and reached scores previously
thought impossible.

So is the AI's strength in this instance that it's relentless and doesn't get
tired? Or does it have a few other insights on the game that most humans miss?
Are there other comparisons of other AI's and where their advantage comes
from? (strategy vs. endurance) Or is the AI's outcome distribution very
similar to a sampling of human outcomes?

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wodenokoto
The article is pretty weak on how the AI works, but says that the 4 rules were
built in as heuristics for the AI, which makes the statement in the article
about how it figured them out seem weird.

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devit
Wow, the C++ AI linked at
[https://github.com/nneonneo/2048-ai](https://github.com/nneonneo/2048-ai) is
really well written.

Anyone who is interested in learning how this kind of AI works would be well
served by studying that code.

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DavidSJ
In the year 2049, we might read the same headline but with a very different
meaning.

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theboywho
The human records will shift to become about who made the AI. So in case you
are afraid to no more be able to brag about having biggest, because of AI,
fear not, it's like saying horses beat all human running records. It will just
get forked into a new category of games.

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zizee
_it 's like saying horses beat all human running records_

Not to detract from your original comment, but human's are pretty competitive
with horses over long distance running

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon)

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blaze33
Nope, horses are still faster than the fastest human marathon runners, see
[http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/6465](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/6465)

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beeboop
It's really a matter of how long, in time, the race is. Someone in your link
even mentions this. The 24 hour record for humans around 180 miles, whereas
for horses it's about 100 miles. Pretty huge difference there.

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blaze33
Ha, good point, maybe the horse cannot run for 24h non-stop when that would be
possible for a human. Nevertheless if a horse can cover 100 miles in ~6 hours,
he still has 18 hours for the remaining 80 miles, so allowing him to rest
(which is also pretty common in some human ultra-trails) I'm pretty sure the
horse could still beat the human record of 180 miles in 24 hours.

