[0xAFFFF]

This is obviously improper. The valid strategy for this game unfolds as follows.

Step 1: Guess 11111.

Step 2: Replace all grey cells with 0s.

Thank you for your careful consideration.

[nmeofthestate]

If you start with 0's you save a small amount of electricity. 1's use up more electricity - any electronic engineer will agree.

[justsid]

Not to ruin a joke, but does it actually make a difference for SRAM? It’s two inverters in a loop, despite not being the same size they are active components. But I’m also a software guy so I could be totally wrong.

[dskloet]

I think displaying black or white pixels makes a bigger difference.

[bdcs]

> does it actually make a difference for SRAM?

I have no idea in practice. But for the thermodynamic limit of actually making a difference, any irreversible change requires heat to be generated, e.g. initializing to zero, truncating, or bitshifts with discarded information. In contrast, addition/subtraction/multiplication/bitshifts without over-/under- flow will not necessarily generate heat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

PS. you can also use mass-energy equivalence to extend this to calculate the lower limit of mass for a given quantity of information. TL;DR: The internet weighs 50g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaUzu-iksi8