In response to Bill "Fresno" Raymond.
<<All very reasonable. FcPro shouldn't try to accommodate a myriad of move
sequence formats produced by disparate solvers. Each solver should convert
its own solutions to some universal format.>>
Thanks, Bill.
<<Good, because M/S multiple-card moves are severely defective.>>
Defective in the sense that they could have been designed to more more
cards in many situations than they do. But, nevertheless, more people play
Freecell on M/S Freecell than any other environment. (Any debate on that?).
Questions are sometimes asked by skeptical Freecell players who don't
believe a given deal is solvable. If you want to give such a skeptic a
written-out solution, unless you express it in moves that can be made on M/S
Freecell, they won't believe it is a valid solution.
<<<<After all, if one were to play Freecell with a "hardware" deck of
playing cards, one would be moving one card at a time.>>
<<Please! If you have a single empty freecell and a single empty column,
surely you would pick up a four-card sequence and transfer it as a group
from one column to another.>>
OK, OK. I perhaps should have qualified that comment. An experienced,
careful player would probably do that. But if one got into that habit and
got careless about it, it would be very easy to cheat accidentally. One
could wind up thinking he/she'd solved an impossible deal. The four-card
move when there is one each empty freecell and column is the "classic"
everyone remembers, but memorizing all the possible multiple-card
permissible moves isn't likely. Actually, that might be a reason why
Freecell lends itself more naturally to computer play than playing-card
play. Has anyone ever heard of anyone playing Freecell with a deck of
cards?
<<You have not described "Solver Evaluation," but SOLUTION evaluation. I
assume that FCS and FcPro and many more solvers will produce accurate
solutions. >>
We happen to be talking about solutions at the moment because of this
compatibilty problem, but I consider solution evaluation just a subdivision
of solver evaluation. Solver evaluation also includes speed of range
solving, absence of false impossibles, size of solution (OK, you could call
that solution evaluation).
Comparison of the lengths of solutions will certainly require a standard
for permissible multi-card moves. Also the question of whether to count
automatic moves to the foundation. The least common denominator would be to
use the count of equivalent single-card moves, but that could impose an
unfair penalty, in that two solutions might rank differently with respect to
each other depending on what rule were used. For the reason stated above,
my vote would still be to favor the M/S Freecell moves. The formula for
those is simple and easy to express.
If a notation were employed for number of cards moves, wouldn't this
need to employed only for moves to an empty column?
Best regards, ------------------Adrian
Received on Sun Dec 09 2001 - 22:20:17 IST