Like my subject says, what makes one deal harder than another?
For a quick response, you might say ace-depth has something to do with it. Then what makes 11982 impossible, where 21491 and 29198 are possible?
I've thrown together a program that evalutates the "entropy" of all the cards- that is, their deviance from the "ideal" card in that position. Ideally, a 0-difficulty game would have all high cards (K, Q) buried at the bottom of the column, and aces and twos right there at the top, ready to be whisked away to the home cells. The program returns "high entropy" when there are aces in the bowels of a column and kings are sitting on top.
Unfortunately, the entropy count isn't the best way to evaluate a hand. There were a great deal of Borland hands that out-scored 11982. For reference, most hands returned a score of around 50-60. Extremely easy hands returned about 40. #11982 was about 71. I found at least a dozen deals in the first 1000 Borland games that exceeded 71, and one that even broke 75. (The 75-game didn't even look that difficult!)
It's been proven that only 8 of the first million MS games are impossible, so there's gotta be something else that makes one game harder than another besides "entropy". What do you guys think?
P.S.: Danny- the notation I was using in my last email was the actual numerical values for the cards produced by the MS randomizer.
Received on Mon Nov 24 2003 - 19:05:49 IST