Shlomi, a while back, commented that about 100 messages had passed between he and I while working on integrating Freecell Solver into FcPro. Now, after another 100, we're finally at the point where it can be semi-publicly distributed. You can download it from
http://www.rrhistorical.com/rrdata/Fcpro65/ .
This version incorporates Shlomi's recently-released version 2.4.3. This fixed up a bug which was uncovered in our testing -- a very weird one causing a crash in Windows on certain intermediate positions.
We are awaiting release of upcoming FCS version 2.6, which will implement atomic moves, to eliminate false impossibles. We ran a test in which we ran all positions in all the solutions which are posted on Mike Keller's website -- these are human-generated solutions to roughly 500 deals from the M/S original 32,000. In testing approximately 25,000 positions, there were 185 false impossibles, a ratio of 1 to 135. In actuality, false impossibles are more prone to occur in the middle part of a solution (never, in this sample, from an original position), so the ratio is no doubt higher for positions likely to interest most players. We are looking forward to replacing version 2.4.3 with 2.6, which hopefully will eliminate all false impossibles.
Comparing the speed of FCS for range solving in the 32,000 M/S Freecell positions, FCS now leads in the speed competition, being roughly twice as fast as both the FcPro solver and Patsolve. This applies to the standard four freecell game. At two and one freecells, it is relatively much less effective, but Shlomi has not yet made any efforts to optimize it for that application.
We said "semi-public" distribution above because we have no plans of our own to publicize this in any other arena except for this forum. We will leave it to others to spread the word as they see fit. ---------------------------Adrian Ettlinger
Received on Sat Jul 06 2002 - 19:49:39 IDT