maweki 8 years ago

This is neat. I wonder whether there is a faster approach using binary decision diagrams or a variant thereof. If the state transition were represented by a binary function, BDDs could allow for counting states without actually enumerating. The question would be, how to actually find all the fixed points of that function.

  • ballenf 8 years ago

    I'd also think that working backwards from all possible winning states would offer some insight and potential for speed. At the expense of being somewhat more difficult (at first glance anyway) to ascertain validity of the predecessor state.

    • jdleesmiller 8 years ago

      (Author here.) That would indeed be interesting, thanks --- I don't think it's trivial to generate all of the possible predecessor states, but it seems like it should be possible. One to think about.

scottmsul 8 years ago

Would be interesting to see alpha zero trained on 2048, conv nets seem well suited for this kind of game.

tomahunt 8 years ago

Oh,I misread this title and thought it was going to be about maths in the year 2048.

  • Al-Khwarizmi 8 years ago

    Me too. I kind of expected a dystopian article where people in 2048 are so badly educated that the most advanced math they can do is count U.S. states one by one!

    Kind of disappointed it's not that, to be honest :)

    • tomahunt 8 years ago

      I was expecting a maths where quantum computation had taken over analytic number theory and theorems could be proved using brute force enumeration.Or something

      • Filligree 8 years ago

        Quantum computers can't do that. Not even in principle. :p

        • whatshisface 8 years ago

          If you take just one piece of information from this blog: Quantum computers would not solve hard search problems instantaneously by simply trying all the possible solutions at once

          (The subtitle of Aaronson's blog.)

          https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/

  • shaunxcode 8 years ago

    Yeah sorry working on that one now. Stay tuned though!

    • tomahunt 8 years ago

      I don't think it needs to be changed. It's actually really interesting to wonder what Mathematics is going to be like in 2048.

  • raverbashing 8 years ago

    And that they were counting (US) states by exaustive enumeration. Well, yeah, how are you going to count them?

    • jameshart 8 years ago

      First, capture, tag, and release a number of US senators. 15 or so should work. Then, reset your traps and capture some more. Count how many of the second capture set were tagged in the first group. This tells you what proportion of the population of Senators you captured the first time, and by dividing the number of senators you tagged by this proportion you can estimate the total population of senators. Divide that number by two to obtain the number of states.

    • jameshart 8 years ago

      Knowing that a bijection exists between states and stars on the US flag, first obtain a US flag. Observe that the stars in the top left corner fall in a rectangular n x m grid with stars located at every node, and also in the rows and columns in between, forming a smaller (n-1) x (m-1) rectangle, so the number of stars is nm + (n-1)(m-1). Then you can just count n and m - 6 and 5 respectively - and substitute to obtain 30+20=50 stars.