Hi Bob,
Very good to hear from you.
I expect to be putting together an experimental version of FcPro containing Freecell Solver, indeed, I expect I'll be putting together a succession of such experimental versions. I'm not sure as yet how we'll be distributing these, as I haven't discussed with Mike Keller whether he'll want to distribute such on his website; another alternative is for Shlomi to post it on his site, and a third alternate would be simply for me to E-mail the .exe file to you.
But it's very good to know you can provide some beta-testing.
I already did a little bit of expounding in my message in response to Bill Raymond. Reflecting on the course of development of our FcPro solver (based on Don Woods), I should explain that the initial motivation was curiosity on the part of both Mike Keller and myself as to what percentage of games were solvable at three down to zero freecells. Also, for that matter, at four freecells. We'd had number from Don Woods based on tests he'd done, over a million hands. For this purpose, we emphasized as the feature the "range solve" mode. I spent quite a bit of time a few years ago doing long runs at various ffeecell counts, and have all my results archived. As I recall, I went to 10 million hands at four freecells. Enough on that, if there's more interest, I'll expand on it.
Subsequent experience, at least as revealed by the FcPro users who we occasionally hear from, is that the greatest interest in the solver is to use it while playing to check whether a given intermediate position is solvable. We have two deficiencies for this purpose. "False impossibles" and "Intractables". "Intractable" is a term used by Don Woods, and means that the solver does not give a result within a reasonable amount of time. The user can set the limit to define quantitatively just where the "Intractable" limit is. These two problems are ones I'm looking forward to, hopefully, solve, or virtually solve, by integrating Shlomi's solver into FcPro. There will be questions of just exactly how to design the user interface. Eventually, the "F7" hot key should invoke one of the two solvers, and if the "Impossible" or "Intractable" result occors, automatically try it on the other sovler. But another feature I'd like to implement will be to use both solvers in a range mode, and to have them cross-check each other for false impossibles. If we get to a point with Shlomi's solver that where we find it solving some of FcPro's Impossibles, but the FcPro solver does not solve any of Shlomi's Impossibles, we might conclude that Shlomi does not have any false impossible problem, and begin making the release version of FcPro to contain Shlomi's solver only. That's all to be determined in the future.
Best regards, --------------Adrian
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Received on Tue Nov 20 2001 - 03:21:26 IST