A 2048 hack

I recently again started obsessively playing 2048. It has gotten to a stage where I look up high scores and strategy discussions for the game on Quora.

While my own high score is off by a factor of at least ten (without undo) and a hundred (with undo), I did discover a bug in the version of 2048 running on my iPhone 5S with a newish iOS. I'll edit this comment to include the exact version number of the game, if available, on my phone.

Before I describe the bug, take a look at this imgur screenshot. If you think about this carefully, you will realize that at this point, the game is about to end. My only legal move is to move the top row left or the left most row up. In either case, the newly opened slot will be adjacent to [64,8] on the top right or [8,2048] on the bottom respectively.

The bug goes like this - if you swipe either of the two options towards the currently open slot and then quickly swipe in the opposite direction, the game will give you a 2- or 4-tile in the slot which is currently open.

Of course, this bug can be exploited at any point in the game and not just when you are about to die.