OK, it seems like most people I invited are here, with the prominent
exceptioon of Markus Oberhumer whom I know for sure is pretty busy and his
Internet connection is sporadic. So, let's start.
I have setup several goals for the 1.5.x version. The most important one
is adding a lot of comments to the code and writing several documents that
will describe the Freecell Solver architecture.
Another goal is to optimize the solution using a BFS scan on the states in
the path of the solution. Stephan Kulow reported that sometimes the
program make a lot of "non-sense" in the sense that it just moves
sequences of cards from stack to stack endlessly. I noticed such a
behaviour too, and it is possible that the optimization scan will improve
the situation a bit.
The third goal of the 1.5.x is to adapt FCS to solve Klondike games. At
the first stage, I'm going to do it with #ifdef's but later on I'll add
run-time support. I have an idea on how we can adapt Freecell Solver to
support any game of card solitaire and I'll describe it in this forum
shortly. Of course, then it's name may become inappropriate, but will
cross that river when we get there. ;-)
As for 1.7.x, unless a more time-stopping task will come ouy, I'd like to
try and thread-enable Freecell Solver. That is not going to be easy,
because there are four different kinds of scans (DFS, Soft-DFS, BFS and
A*) and there may be more by then, so it will require a lot of planning
and thought before the actual coding is done. Another thing to remember is
that I also want to support soft threads (I.e: switch-tasked by FCS
itself) and system threads (Pthreads, CreateThread and friends).
So, what seems to be our agenda for now is:
1. Put a news item on the FCS homepage and dedicate a page to this
mailing-list.
2. Put a message in comp.ai.games about this mailing-list (Justin, can you
do that? The Technion does not have any Usenet connection)
3. Write the summary for the Architecture.txt file.
4. Write a message describing the Klondike handling.
5. Write a message describing how to manage the BFS path optimization.
6. Go over the code and see if there is anything that is not understood,
so a comment can be added there.
I have a test this Wednesday, so I can't promise I'll do anything of those
first. And I believe item #6 should be done by somebody else except me.
Do you believe I missed anything?
Cheers,
Shlomi Fish
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish shlomif_at_vipe.technion.ac.il
Home Page:
http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail: shlomif_at_techie.com
The prefix "God Said" has the extraordinary logical property of
converting any statement that follows it into a true one.
Received on Mon Feb 12 2001 - 00:19:42 IST