The described challenge looks like it's different from the actual game in important ways.

Obviously there's the different chances for a 2 vs a 4 (used to be 10%, here it's 25%). More importantly, though, it seems that you don't have to slide any tiles for new ones to be spawned.

I've only beaten the game once. By far the hardest part (given the strategy I used) was when I was forced to move in a direction I didn't want to, because all of the other directions didn't move tiles and thus didn't generate a new one. Without this, the game seems like it would be a lot easier.

I love hackerrank and checkio. Both are great platforms. I wish that they would integrate with Coursera/udacity so that I could solve the programming challenges in one of these mediums and at the same time get guidance from a lecture.

However, if you want to go through some of the courses, you can get some machine learning as well from lectures on programming a self driving car at udacity and implement them at hackerrank.

The score of a game is very much dependent on luck, though.. I've made an AI bot (https://github.com/helgefmi/c2048) that averages on ~50k score, but its highscore is ~220k. Sometimes it gets 13k. So to get a good score (or your best score) on hackerrank.com, you'd need to resubmit 500 times. At least with the algorithms that I use.

In 2048 a player move that causes no actions on the board will not cause a new tile to be created. It seems at first glance this is not the case here.

I'm just thinking that if the game do not stop at 2048 it will be much more challenging, as reaching 2048 is a relatively easy task for AI.