Shlomi Fish | 22 Feb 16:31
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Perl QOTW #2010-02-22 - Freecell Scans with Short Solutions

IMPORTANT: Please do not post solutions, hints, or other spoilers
until at least 60 hours after the date of this message.  Thanks.

Requests for clarifications and other discussion would be OK.

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Today I'm borrowing the collective wisdom of the Perl Quiz-of-the-Whatever
forum for an algorithmic task I need to accomplish for my own project.
The project in question is Freecell Solver ( http://fc-solve.berlios.de/ ),
which is an automated solver for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeCell and 
several other types of card solitaire. 

fc-solve starts from the initial layout of the solitaire game and recurses
into more and more positions, which are counted by the solver's iterations,
until it reaches the final, solved state where all cards were moved to the
foundations.

After a certain number of iterations (which are roughly indicative of 
how long it took it to run), it yields a solution of a certain length ,which 
is desired to be as short as possible. Note that it may also report that it
is unable to solve the board (after going over all the derived positions) or 
that it could not find a solution within the quota of iterations that have
been allocated for it. 

Now, fc-solve has many different atomic scans, that when run alone, each
yields different solutions with different iteration counts and lengths.

In this Subversion directory, I have collected the iterations counts and the
solutions lengths of a sample of boards - the first 32,000 games in Microsoft
(Continue reading)


Gmane