The gist is that it allows a third-party seller to stock a bunch of identical, not-yet-locked phones and offer a choice of carrier plans. The phone binds to whichever carrier the user first activated on.
So if you’re buying a phone, verify it is not one of these units.
> It’s simpler than doing a limit on number of states
According to who?
A counter that you ++ each move sounds a lot easier to me than throwing off a separate thread/callback to handle a timer.
> Doing a time limit also enforces bot moving in a reasonable time.
It's designed for specific hardware, and will never have to run on anything significantly slower, but might have to run on things significantly faster. It doesn't need a time cutoff that would only matter in weird circumstances and make it do a weirdly bad move. It needs to be ready for the future.
> It puts a nice limit to set up a compromise between speed and difficulty.
Both methods have that compromise, but using time is way more volatile.
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