On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif_at_iglu.org.il> wrote:
>
> > I am also going to download the solver now there is
> > a Windows install version.
>
> Nice. Please let me know (either via the mailing list or via private email)
> which problems you encounter and what you think about it.
Will do. It will be a day or two before I find the free time to do it. Now
I'm retired and in the U3A I seem to be busy all the time.
> I was involved with a free cell solver many
> > years ago when I was a member of CIX.
>
> Is it this CIX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIX ?
Yes that's the one. It was the place for online information in those days
when Alta Vista was the prime search engine, Yahoo was just getting going
and Google hadn't been thought of.
Can you tell us more about
> that solver you were involved with?
We had a CIX conference devoted to proving (and finding) solutions to all
the Freecell games. In those days the only Freecell (of note) was the free
microsoft one with 32k games. We succeeded in solving all the games except
the one impossible one. One of our members cracked the deal behind the
Microsoft version and we developed a player and extended it to 64k games. I
proved that all of the games in the 64K version were unique. Since this was
in Win 3.11 days, pre Pentium, I coded the deals down to a linear string and
wrote them out to a file which I then transmitted to an IBM mainframe,
sorted in to alphabetic order on the code string and ran the result through
a duplicate checker I wrote in Assembler (which is my lingua franca). Seems
long winded now.
As far as the solver went I was invloved in the beta testing of it, but not
the coding. I will have to dig out the old cix conference and look up more
detail. All I can remember now, without checking back, is that it was
initially slow and could get stuck in shuffling loops moving from one stack
to another and then back again. To over come both problems hashing was
introduced and storing of positions reached. The solver, initially stand
alone, was later incorporated into the Freecell player. The player was
quite good, as we all contributed ideas to its development and helped in the
testing. It stored all the solved games and would restore new soloutions if
better, either based on time or number of moves (it could do either based on
a configuration option). The player was later extended to some huge number
of games (I forget how many) but to my knowledge it has not been proven that
they are all unique. The player was available on the web at one time but the
chap who developed it had to give up due to lak of time. When I retired, I
offered to take it over but he had lost the source by then.
--
JG
Received on Wed Apr 01 2009 - 09:30:21 IDT