[ANN] Successful Proof-of-Concept solver for Golf patience/solitaire

From: Shlomi Fish <shlomif_at_shlomifish.org>
Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2018 19:20:01 +0200

Hi all and happy new civil year!

I am happy to announce that my git branch of tweaking the Perl 5-based black
hole solitaire solver into solving
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golf_(patience) appears to have resulted in a
functional prototype / proof-of-concept:

*
https://github.com/shlomif/black-hole-solitaire/tree/feature-branch--golf-solitaire-support

*
https://github.com/shlomif/black-hole-solitaire/commit/c667bcf21a431274c5062acd88773b73dce6f1e1

I tested it like this:

mkdir boards

/home/shlomif/progs/freecell/git/fc-solve/fc-solve/source/board_gen/gen-multiple-pysol-layouts
--dir boards/ --game golf --prefix golf --suffix .board seq 1 1000

( for fn in
boards/*.board ; do echo "== $fn ==" ; perl -Ilib bin/black-hole-solve "$fn" ;
done ) | tee -a ~/golfs.txt

and then played the solution of deal #1000 in PySol FC manually.

I initially resisted trying to solve Golf because it had a talon, but a few
days ago decided to rethink my prejudice and try again. Reading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golf_(patience) led me to
https://politaire.com/article/golf.html where he says he wrote a solver for it
(but it does not appear to have been made public). I also read
https://politaire.com/article/blackhole.html where he mentions my solver and
some further work by Ian Gent.

Also reading now it seems that my solver currently handles the Queen-on-King
variation of Golf solitaire. Also note that it will require further work to be
incorporated into the C solver.

Cheers!

        Shlomi Fish

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Received on Mon Dec 31 2018 - 09:20:09 IST