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From site: http://physics.tamu.edu/~Cdude/freecell.html
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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 un-
winnable deals are constructible. With this in mind, many people have
searched for unwinnable hands systematically from hand 1. The purpose of the
project was to organize the individual searchers to cover different hands.
110 volunteers worked over a 9-month period from August 1994 - April 1995 to
solve all 32000 hands. All were solved except #11982. In addition several
computer programs were written to analyse hands with mixed results. Greg
Schmidt's program was able to solve many of the hardest hands but could not
crack 11982. Scott McCarter performed an exhaustive computer search of hand
11982, finding no solution, thus proving 11982 unsolvable. Shawn Dube has
verified this result with an independent computer search.
Each volunteer received a set of 100 consecutive hands at a time to try.
They solved all they could, and reported back with a list of unsolved hands.
Solutions were not required, but volunteers were encouraged to write down
solutions to the harder hands (there is a standard format for solutions,
developed by Andrey Tsouladze), thus there is a catalog of these solutions,
as well as a more extensive list of hard hands.
Almost as soon as the project began, it was found that there was a version
floating around with a different set of hands. Fortunately, the distribution
of the 'other' version is very limited. Only one volunteer had the wrong
version.
The most prolific solver was Andrey Tsouladze with almost 5000 hands solved
during the course of the project. The longest winning streak (first attempt)
was 222 by Matt Dickey.
If you have Java, try Netcell, where you can play FreeCell on the Net, and
try to break Matt's record.
This page has been accessed 17627 times since July 18, 1996.
Dave Ring, Physics Department, Texas A&M University.
dwr2560@tam2000.tamu.edu
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