🚀 go-pugleaf

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                    The Internet FreeCell project.

Most people who have used ms-windows are familiar with FreeCell, one of
the 'game pack' games, that every windows system seems to have. It is
described as a logic puzzle in the form of a solitaire card game. There
are 32000 numbered deals. The online help claims:

    "It is believed (although not proven) that every game is winnable."

There is some debate about the meaning of this, in particular does
'every game' mean just the 32000, or all possible games. It is known
that unwinnable deals are constructible. With this in mind, many people
have searched for unwinnable hands systematically from hand 1. The purpose
of the project is to organize the individual searchers to cover different
hands.

In addition to unwinnable deals, it is also useful to make a list of
difficult hands, so that advanced solvers can still enjoy the game
without getting bored.

If you would like to participate in this historic endeavor, just send me
an email (don't post!), and I will reply with a set of 100 (or more or less
if you want) hands for you to try at your own pace. When you are
finished (or get bored) you can send me a note, letting me know which hands
you solved, which you skipped, and which, if any, were especially hard.

I am told the game is available by anonymous ftp at ftp.cit.cornell.edu
in /pub/windows/comm/win32s.zip .

If you have already done a study, please let me know so I don't have to
assign those hands.

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Update: 

1.	We now have over 70 volunteers and over 27000 assigned hands. Over
fifteen thousand hands are now known to be solvable. 11982 remains the only
unsolved hand. Results have slowed down quite a bit and we need to reassign
many hands, so we need lots of new volunteers!

2.	The hard hands which have been reported to me are: 1941, 11982,
25599, 454, 3973, 718, 16191, 8534, 5374, 2577, 20055, 2772, 5482, 617,
4257, 5548, 5557, 4946, 3801, 4368, 8323, 1689, 9538, 8820, 2350, 9617,
9700, 7107, 7160, 30801, 30108, 7600, 8005, 17524, 18992, 16575, 16576,
19633, 26421, 8678, 8652, 19763, 20715, 26576, 26694, 17277, 2670, 17764,
17768, 19861, 21278, 27188, 21051, 13015, 24457.

3.	There are many versions floating around, but only a rare few have a
different set of hands. One of these versions dates back to before the
game was (presumably) bought by Microsoft. You have the right version
if the upper left card in the layout of 11982 is AH.

Followups set to rec.puzzles .

--
Dave Ring                | If you would like to participate in the Internet
dwr2560@tam2000.tamu.edu | FreeCell Project or find out what it is, email me.